{"id":675,"date":"2021-04-14T12:40:12","date_gmt":"2021-04-14T09:40:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/?p=675"},"modified":"2021-04-15T14:47:10","modified_gmt":"2021-04-15T11:47:10","slug":"the-service-robot-may-watch-you-when-you-do-bad-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/2021\/04\/14\/the-service-robot-may-watch-you-when-you-do-bad-things\/","title":{"rendered":"The service robot may watch you when you do bad things"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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More robots are expected\nin the not too distant future and this includes service robots sharing the same\nenvironment with humans. My personal prediction is that they are more likely to\nappear in workplace environments, such as offices, before they enter our homes;\nthe coming generations of such robots will be expensive and, unfortunately, unable\nto do many of the things in our homes that we wish that they should do \u2013 such\nas washing clothes, cleaning the kitchen and perhaps cooking food for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When they do appear,\nthey are likely to be \u2013 at least to some degree \u2013 autonomous. This aspect has\ncreated much concern among those who think that autonomous entities can make\ndecisions that are harmful to humans. Such decisions have been discussed, for\nexample, when it comes to self-driving cars, weapon systems and credit evaluations. And\nthere are indeed many suggestions about how to restrict the potential of robot transgressions. It is\nalmost a field of research on its own, in which researchers discuss concepts\nsuch as artificial morality, machine morality and roboethics. Some say that\nrobots should be programmed so that there are things that they never would do;\nothers, who are more optimistic about what is possible, have suggested that\nrobots should be developed so that they have morality \u2013 that is to say, the\nability to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong and an ability\nto choose what is right. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I see it, however, the main\ntransgressors will still be humans. In our lives, there are so many norms to\nknow, they are sometimes conflicting, subject to debate, and they often serve\nas barriers in relation to our needs and wants, so that it is simply inevitable\nthat all of us, every now and then, will be transgressors. This, in turns,\nraises an additional but less well-researched issue about robot morality and transgressions:\nwhat happens when we, the humans, are the transgressors and when the robots\nunderstand that what we do is wrong? Would this reduce the number of\ntransgressions and thereby make the world a better place? Or would it add to\nthe feeling that we are often monitored? That is to say, robots with artificial\nmorality that watch over us may create a deeply disturbing Orwellian\nenvironment. It may be noted that several major corporation do engage in\nelectronic surveillance of employees by other means than robots and that this\ntypically has a strong negative charge for employees. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, I had a chance to examine\nthis issue experimentally by having an employee in an office conduct norm\nviolations while a service robot was watching. I used my own robot, which has\n16 degrees of freedom, meaning that it can do amazing things with its body, and\nit can be made to appear as highly autonomous by the way it talks \u2013 in human\nlanguage \u2013 to humans. In one experiment, the robot discovered that the employee\nwas not doing what he said he was doing with his laptop; he said that he was\npreparing a presentation of a sales strategy \u2013 instead, however, he was\nwatching porn online. And in the other experiment, the employee, who was about\nto take an apple in the office kitchen, coughed heavily without covering his\nmouth so that all the fruits in a bowl got a full shower of potentially\ncontagious material (you can see what it looked like here<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since these were experiments, the\nrobot was manipulated so that it either did not understand that the employee\nwas violating norms or it did understand this, which it indicated by condemning\nthe human for the wrongdoings. Then, the robot-employee interactions were shown\nto participants whose task it was to answer questions about the robot. In a\ntypical experiment of this type, the participants see only one of the\nmanipulated versions and the researcher\u2019s indication of an effect comes from\ncomparing the responses from those who saw different versions and this is how\nmy robot experiments were made, too. In any event, the result was unambiguous:\nwhen the robot indicated that it had understood that the human violated a norm,\nthe robot was more positively evaluated and was perceived as delivering a\nhigher level of service quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is perhaps not so surprising,\nbecause to build a robot that understands that a violation of human norms has\noccurred is quite a remarkable engineering and programming feat. Yet some part\nof me had expected that such an understanding is eerie, something that can\npotentially result in the unwelcome omnipresence of electronic besserwissers<\/em> eager to be judges of what\nwe do, and that this would have attenuated the impressions of the norm-savvy\nrobot. But such sentiments did not materialize in my experiments. Presumably,\nthen, the results reflect a very human aspect: we typically react very\nnegatively to norm violations, also in cases in which we are not personally\nvictimized, and this ability facilitates stable relationships with others as\nwell as all those cooperation activities that made Homo sapiens<\/em> special.    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Magnus\nS\u00f6derlund<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professor of\nMarketing and Head of the Center for Consumer Marketing (CCM), Stockholm School\nof Economics<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Senior Fellow Researcher at CERS, Hanken<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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More robots are expected in the not too distant future and this includes service robots sharing the same environment with humans. My personal prediction is that they are more likely to appear in workplace environments, such as offices, before they enter our homes; the coming generations of such robots will be expensive and, unfortunately, unable …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[29,84,39],"class_list":["post-675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cers-blog","tag-research","tag-robots","tag-service"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":682,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions\/682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}