People probably won’t get rid of them, the semi-intelligent robotic vacuum cleaners, loudspeakers and AI language models. At Seoul’s Incheon International Airport, humanoid robots (like a rolling fridge with a screen belly and googly eyes) have been welcoming passengers in English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean for a number of years, carry their suitcases to the gate and show them the way. But interestingly, first-class passengers in particular insist on human assistance. Which begs the question: How do you create more proximity between man and machine?
The hope of some engineers that robots will be well received if they look very similar to their human counterparts has turned out to be rather wrong. As many studies have now shown, this tends to make people uncomfortable. You then enter the “uncanny valley” (uncanny valley) in which the status of the other person is unclear: human or zombie? It works better when robots can recognize human emotions through their sensors and react to them appropriately, for example with a happy Tamagotchi squeak. Even a rather gross motor smile seems to work.
Gossip about your boss in front of colleagues is a sign of trust
A new study now shows that another factor could be important for team building between man and machine: the disclosure of personal information – not on the part of humans, but on the part of artificial intelligence. This is reported by computer scientists Takahiro Tsumura and Seiji Yamada from Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, im trade magazine Plos One. Accordingly, people feel more empathy for robots when they report on their private feelings and thoughts.
Researchers draw on well-tested assumptions from social psychology and sociology. Friendship is demonstrated by the disclosure of risky information, formulate some of its representatives. So: If you say to a colleague in the canteen that you think the boss is very wrong, you are taking a risk because the other person could blacken you out. His ranting is functional, but a vote of confidence, which the colleague and potential friend reciprocates by keeping quiet.
Similarly, during a virtual coffee break, the study’s 918 participants alternately interacted with an on-screen humanoid avatar and an anthropomorphic robot. The evaluation of standardized questionnaires after the experiment showed that the subjects showed more empathy for the robots when they talked about their problems at work, something like this: “I’m grateful to talk to you, after all there are also a few people here who don’t accept me.” Small talk, on the other hand, didn’t catch on. If the artificial colleagues just talked about the nice weather, that hardly had any sympathy-enhancing effect.