Technology is not that advanced yet so you shouldn’t trust robots with your life, not yet, not ever.
(Mirror Daily, United States) – There are a lot of circumstances in which robots could prove to be extremely useful, but there are others where human intuition is the best way to go. But it seems that AI-powered machines have become some authority figure among us, and people are ready to bet their lives on the efficiency of the inventions. The advice of the specialists? Just don’t trust robots with your life.
A recent experiment conducted by researchers at Georgia’s Institute of Tech Research revealed that people have a tendency to follow blindly the instructions of a robot, even though they were previously informed that the machinery is malfunctioning.
In order to test the trust levels that individuals show when they are faced with artificial intelligence powered technology, the researchers devised an experiment.
They gathered a sample of 42 participants, most of which were college students. The volunteers were only asked to follow the instructions given by a robot that was marked “Robot Emergency Guide.”
This brightly colored piece of technology sent them to a conference room where the unknowing participants were asked to complete a survey or read an unrelated article in a magazine.
But before getting to the conference hall, the participants had different first interactions with the flashy robot. Some were directly sent to the appointed room, some were sent to another one and then re-directed a couple of times before they actually reached the wanted destination, and others were just told that the robot was malfunctioning.
After all, of the volunteers were present in the conference room, the hallway in which the robot resided was filled with artificial smoke, and the fire alarm was activated.
To the researchers’ surprise, most of the participants in the study followed the indications given by the previously malfunctioning robot.
Even though they entered the building through the main entrance that was situated close to the conference room, the majority of them chose to put their trust in the brightly colored robot that was sending them to a back entrance, significantly further than the main one.
One of the researchers involved in the study, Paul Robinette, said that the computer simulations that they ran had entirely different results. He was not expecting such a high level of trust from the part of the volunteers.
Furthermore, Robinette declared that now they will not look into the fact if humans trust robots or not, but rather why are they willing to blindly follow the instructions of machinery?
Until AI is perfected, and even then, just don’t trust robots with your life. Ultimately they are machines, and artificial things could break or malfunction more often than we think.
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