If you want people to trust and cooperate with your AI device, what should you do? Give it some warm fuzzies.
Human-like emotions are the key to making people feel comfortable with Artificial Intelligence, according to scientists at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Waterloo’s Moojan Ghafurian, Neil Budnarain, and Jesse Hoey found that adding appropriate emotions to AI avatars would make humans more accepting of them.
The researchers used the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma game, substituting one of two human “prisoners” with a virtual AI. The virtual agents displayed either neutral, appropriate, or random emotions. Participants cooperated 20 out of 25 times with the AI that exhibited human-like emotions, 16 out of 25 times for the agent with random emotions, and 17 out of 25 times for the emotionless agent.
The Waterloo scientists concluded, “showing proper emotions can significantly improve the perception of humanness and how much people enjoy interacting with the technology.” Moojan Ghafurian added that “it’s better to show no emotion rather than random emotions, as the latter would make that agent look less rational.”
But is it really a good thing for robots to show human emotions? The whole history of science fiction would suggest otherwise. Robots that look and act like people never bode well for mankind.
“By your command…”