Most westerners distrust robots but what if they free us for a better life? – The Guardian

Where westerners see the Terminator, the Japanese see Astro Boy: Research suggests cultural differences influence peoples view of robots. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros

Im always amazed at people who tell me they would never trust a driverless car to take them somewhere but then happily get into a car driven by their teenager. Talk about preferring the devil you know.

Driverless vehicles are likely to be much safer than those driven by humans. The safety differential is so large that insurance companies are already looking at alternative business models to make up for the fact that premiums will likely plummet once robots are driving us everywhere.

The barriers to our transition to driverless vehicles, and to other forms of robot intervention into our daily lives, then, are not just technical but social, political and psychological. Trust will be a huge issue and you dont have to think too hard to see why.

You might not have a problem with robots stacking shelves in a warehouse or a supermarket but how comfortable are you with a robot babysitting your child? Or looking after your aged parents? How do you feel about robot soldiers? Or robot sex workers?

A recent survey conducted by the European Commission found that, overall, people have a positive attitude towards robots. About 70% of respondents suggested they were very or fairly positive about them, with only 23% responding negatively. Men were somewhat more positive (76%) than women (65%). There was also a correlation between education levels and positive feelings: the higher the level of education, the more positive people felt towards robots.

Nonetheless, the figures changed markedly when the commission asked more specific questions.

So while most respondents were OK with robots being involved in space exploration or manufacturing, about 60% thought robots should be banned from looking after children, the elderly or the disabled. About 34% thought robots should be banned from education, while between 20 and 27% of those surveyed wanted them banned from healthcare and leisure activities.

Other research suggests cultural differences, with the Japanese often cited as more comfortable with robots than westerners, as evidenced by the fact that robots are more common in Japan. Is this a chicken-or-egg scenario? Are they more trusting of robots because they are more common in everyday life, or are they more common because people are more trusting of them? Whatever the answer, in general it is held that the Japanese are more positive towards robots. Where westerners see the Terminator, the Japanese see Astro Boy.

It seems reasonable to imply from EU figures that, for westerners, the closer robots are involved with our intimate relationships with our children or our parents the less likely we are to trust them. It is also likely that familiarity increases our trust, so that we are happy to trust robots in factories but less happy to let them drive us around.

The exception to the intimacy-trust equation might be sex robots, where other research shows that men in particular are quite comfortable with the idea of sex with robots. Women are less so, though men and women line up closely in their views about using sex robots as an aid for the disabled. And both men and women approve although the approval level is higher among men of sex robots being used in lieu of an affair with a human.

About 60% of people thought robots should be banned from looking after children, the elderly or the disabled.

So familiarity with robots, and the degree to which they are involved with those we love, affects the extent to which we trust them but can we be more precise about where our concerns lie?

According to recent research, peoples views about robots can be grouped into six categories, namely the frightening other, the subhuman other, the human substitute, the sentient other, the divine other and the co-evolutionary path to immortality.

The connection is a view about how much like us, or unlike us, a robot might be. The paper suggests our reaction to robots is similar to our reaction to humans: we trust those closest to us, most like us and with whom we are most familiar. We are more wary of strangers, or, in this case, the robot doing something were not used to robots doing.

The sixth option - the co-evolutionary path to immortality is the most interesting. This refers to whats known as posthumanism, the idea that, ultimately, humans will integrate with machines and machine intelligence. For this to happen, our trust of technology would have to be at an all-time high but there are certainly those who see posthumanism as inevitable and desirable.

The entrepreneur Elon Musk recently said, Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence. For him, it is a matter of survival in a world where human capabilities will be exceeded by those of robots and other forms of artificial intelligence.

But this warrants further inspection.

Musk is also interested in humans migrating to Mars to set up colonies. Of course, he has a commercial interest in pursuing such plans but I cant help but feel his interest goes deeper than profit. I wonder if this sort of posthumanism isnt a form of Stockholm syndrome, a situation where we are so overwhelmed by a potential threat of extinction that we simply surrender?

So, what on the surface seems like a wildly ambitious series of programs colonise Mars, integrate with robots might actually be a failure of nerve and imagination, a failure to confront the political and social realities of an economic system that is destroying the planet and undermining the ability of humans to earn a decent living, along with a fear that we will be usurped as the pre-eminent intelligence on the planet. Perhaps Musk, and others like him, are less entrepreneurial than suffering from an existential crisis?

Planning to live on Mars, or becoming a cyborg, might actually be a hi-tech version of burying your head in the sand. This is not to say we should shun technology but it is to say that maybe we are thinking about this the wrong way, especially in regard to trust.

Perhaps there is another form of human/robot integration that is possible. Not integration in the Musk sense of turning humans into robots but in the sense of using robots to free us from the sort of work that diminishes our capacity to be fully human: of integrating robots fully into our economy in a way that increases productivity, reduces our reliance on extractive industries, while releasing humans from the need to spend the majority of their life earning a living.

The ancient Greeks believed that labour the sort of repetitive work needed in order to survive was beneath their dignity and this was why they made sure that such work was done by slaves. Freed from this burden, the Greek citizens pretty much invented western civilisation. Is it really too hard for us to imagine a world where we use robots in a similar way, to free us from the grind of daily labour, so that we might instead create a new era of human flourishing?

That is to say, rather than trying to escape the human condition by becoming a robot or going to Mars, would we not be better off using technologies to confront the problems of scarcity, inequality and environmental degradation, and imagine a world that was post-work and post-capitalist rather than posthuman?

For that to be realised, the issue is less likely to be whether we trust robots than whether we trust ourselves enough to pursue the revolutionary change this would involve.

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Most westerners distrust robots but what if they free us for a better life? - The Guardian