The girl holds up a yellow toy dinosaur and waves it in front of Kismet. She moves the toy to the right, then to the left, and the robot turns its head to follow. Turkle, who can be seen off to the side (with a shorter haircut and larger glasses than now), says she gave almost no guidance to the girl—the goal was to put robot and child together and see what would happen. "It's called a first-encounter study. I say, 'I want you to meet an interesting new thing.'"
As we watch, the girl tries to cover the robot with a cloth to dress it, and then tries to clip a microphone to the robot. Soon Kismet is saying the girl's name and other simple statements, and the girl experiments with other ways to communicate with this mix of steel, gears, and microchips.
Most of the kids in the study loved Kismet and described the robot as a friend that liked them back, despite careful explanations by Turkle's colleagues that it was simply programmed to respond to certain cues and was definitely not alive. The response appears to be a natural one, Turkle says. "We are hard-wired that if something meets extremely primitive standards, either eye contact or recognition or very primitive mutual signaling, to accept it as an Other because as animals that's how we're hard-wired—to recognize other creatures out there."
One day during Turkle's study at MIT, Kismet malfunctioned. A 12-year-old subject named Estelle became convinced that the robot had clammed up because it didn't like her, and she became sullen and withdrew to load up on snacks provided by the researchers. The research team held an emergency meeting to discuss "the ethics of exposing a child to a sociable robot whose technical limitations make it seem uninterested in the child," as Turkle describes in Alone Together. "Can a broken robot break a child?" they asked. "We would not consider the ethics of having children play with a damaged copy of Microsoft Word or a torn Raggedy Ann doll. But sociable robots provoke enough emotion to make this ethical question feel very real."
Chronicle
Mnjah... Vaat see on üks probleemne koht, millele ma ei ole mõelnud. Lapsed. Nad küll kohanevad kiiremini, kuid nende ootused ja lootused on naiivsed ja igasuguse sotsiaalse filtrita. Ma seni ikka mõelnud, et robootikaga tegelevad interaktiivselt täiskasvanud (siinse peatüki kontekstis), aga kui mängus on laps, siis... Mis saab lapsest, kes on maast madalast robotiga niivõrd "peadpidi" koos olnud, et ehkki füüsiliselt on ta iseseisev, siis emotsionaalselt on ta vaid tehnoloogilise süsteemi osa...Statistics: Posted by janMortis — Mon Jan 17, 2011 6:56 pm
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