Human Empathy for Robots and Artificial Intelligence

Robots are fantastic creators or are they? It deepens on who you ask. When I hear people talk about the future and a world where humans and robots live among each other, peoples opinion vary from those who think that robots can do a lot of things for the humankind and that they can make human life better. There are also individuals who doesn’t like robots. They think that robots are evil and that they are going to destroy the world’s population. But are the robots able to feel the same empathy as humans. Do humans feel empathy for robots? Are humans able to have emotional attachment towards robots? Does it matter if we supply the human race with some robots? Nevertheless the big question is, can robots affect people’s ability to empathize with objects?

According to studies from University of Duisburg Essen we the human race are able to create an emotional connection with robots. They did a test study on some elderly people, where they had programmed a robot to help them and see if they could create a connection between a person and a robot. In the experiment, they used 6 elderly people. They wanted to know if the test would show that the human would develop an emotional attachment for the robot. The study showed that some of the elderly people, gave the robot a name, they smiled at the robot and they also talked to it, just as they would do to an ordinary person. The experiment showed that two out of six of the elderly individuals treated the robot with compassion and empathy. The other four didn’t seem to get an emotional connection or any kind of empathy for the robot. Maybe those who didn´t feel anything towards the artificial person felt uncomfortable with the presence of a robot instead of a real life nurse. It might have something to do with the theory of Uncanny Valley, that states that we don’t know how the robot is or how it behaves and we don’t know what the robot will do to us. Some think that the robots are here to kill us. It might be because, they still aren´t enough, `human like´, just jet.