Week 4 Readings – Robots and Empathy

I was really interested in the Kahn Jr., Gary, & Shen reading about children’s social relationships with robots. The report expressed a concern over children’s conceptions of robots as social entities, arguing that children might dominate the robots in ways that are detrimental to their development.

What I didn’t understand about this argument was that the authors begin by talking about how children are empathetic toward robots, and then argue that robots aren’t good for children because children may not be empathetic towards them. The research they site already implies that children do believe they should treat life-like robots with care, excepting certain rights and privileges within a larger society.

I understand the developmental implications of relating to a robot whose rights exist in a child’s mind somewhere between a vending machine and a human, but I don’t see how that necessarily leads to adolescents dominating sex robots. To me, this argument seemed not so unlike a common illogical argument against same-sex marriage that asks whether legalizing same-sex marriage would set into a motion an “anything goes” society in which a man could marry his horse.

I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t cautions to heed with regards to interactions with robots and child development. I just think that the more interesting part of this paper was that children were largely empathetic towards the robots and treated them as one might treat a real social entity. I wondered how robots might be leveraged to actually help children practice and develop their potential for caring behaviors, rather than neglect them.