SOLDIERS DEVELOP RELATIONSHIPS WITH THEIR BATTLEFIELD ROBOTS

Men and dogs develop emotional attachment to their robots.

 

Robots are playing an ever-increasing role on the battlefield. As a consequence, soldiers are becoming attached to their robots, assigning names, gender — and even holding funerals when they're destroyed.

 

But could these emotional bonds affect outcomes in the war zone? Soldiers often anthropomorphize their robots and feel empathy towards them.

 

Many soldiers see their robots as extensions of themselves and are often frustrated with technical limitations or mechanical issues which they project onto themselves.  Some operators can even tell who's controlling a specific robot by watching the way it moves.

 

Which leads to a troubling question: What if they "care'" too much about the robot to send it into a dangerous situation?

 

A study shows that soldiers were very clear it was a tool, but at the same time, patterns in their responses indicated they sometimes interacted with the robots in ways similar to a human or pet.

 

Soldiers told researcher Julie Carpenter that  their first reaction to a robot being blown up was anger at losing an expensive piece of equipment, but some also described a feeling of loss.

 

Last year the Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems Labs (HINTS) at the University of Washington conducted a fascinating study in which a robot named Robovie was unfairly put into a closet despite his verbal protestations.

 

Watch video to see how a 15-year-old responded to this moral violation, and read more here:
http://io9.com/soldiers-are-developing-relationships-with-their-battle-1348251965

RELATED

 

Research shows dogs are happy to interact with robots.   A recent experiment showed that dogs reacted to robots with voices and faces as if they were humans, indicating that future social robots could be tested on dogs to evaluate the bots’ humanness.

Read more - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/?p=3211

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