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<\/div>Robot Rights<\/h2>
It’s an old philosophical question: if a speeding train is careening down the track, and it’s about to crush a group of injured people, would you pull a lever that would redirect it to kill just one innocent person?<\/p>
Now, provocative new research puts a new twist on the thought experiment by asking people whether they’d pull the lever to kill an intelligent robot and save a person.<\/p>
Trolleyology<\/h2>
A new paper<\/a> in the journal Social Cognition<\/em> describes an experiment in which participants were presented with a variety of ethical puzzles: whether to sacrifice a robot presented as a “simple machine,” a robot with intelligence and other human traits, and even whether to sacrifice a regular human.<\/p> “The more the robot was depicted as human — and in particular the more feelings were attributed to the machine — the less our experimental subjects were inclined to sacrifice it,” said co-author Markus Paulus, a researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians University, in a statement<\/a>. “This result indicates that our study group attributed a certain moral status to the robot.”<\/p> Maybe the result was intuitive: the more strongly the robot was presented as being person-like — having its own “thoughts, experiences, pain, and emotions” — the less likely the participants were to sacrifice it in order to save human lives. To Paulus, that suggest a grim takeaway.<\/p> “One possible implication of this finding is that attempts to humanize robots should not go too far,” Paulus said. “Such efforts could come into conflict with their intended function — to be of help to us.”<\/p> READ MORE:<\/strong> Robot on the Trolley Car Track: How Valuable is Robot Life?<\/a> [Interesting Engineering<\/em>]<\/p><\/div> More on robot ethics: <\/strong>Saudi Arabia Made a Robot a Citizen. Now, She’s Calling For Women’s Rights.<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/div> The post They Asked if People Would Rather Kill a Human or a Sentient Robot<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p> See original here: Robot Rights It\u2019s an old philosophical question: if a speeding train is careening down the track, and it\u2019s about to crush a group of injured people, would you pull a lever that would redirect it to kill just one innocent person? Continue reading Virtual Persons<\/h2>
They Asked if People Would Rather Kill a Human or a Sentient Robot<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"