Machines with Faces: Robot Bodies and the Problem of Cruelty

Abstract

Even if it is never possible to create a sentient robot that might lay claim to the status of personhood, a convincingly realistic robotic simulation of the human body could alter how human beings act towards one another. This article argues that the human face exerts a powerful influence over interpersonal interaction, creating empathetic connections that limit our capacity to engage in acts of cruelty; an ability to convincingly simulate the human face would detach it from the attribution of human personhood and so encourage a dismissal of its affective charge. This possibility can be understood in the context of existing attempts to inoculate individuals against the appeal of the face so as to facilitate organised killing.

Could Social Robots Make Us Kinder or Crueller to Humans and Animals?

“…But even if children are not so easily fooled, we may still think that their responses to robots could inluence the formation of virtue. Black [14] imagines future cases in which we violently harm robots with very realistic human faces. We may, he imagines, initially dismiss our automatic responses of distress as responses to "mistreatment" of mere machines; yet performing these acts repetitively could dull such visceral responses towards real people.…”

“…Coeckelbergh [13] notes the insuficient empirical evidence concerning a "link." Black [14] suggests that humanoid robots, and in particular their faces, might need to be (almost) indistinguishable from humans in order for their mistreatment to engender callousness or cruelty to people. In a more sceptical vein, Johnson and Verdicchio [15] contend, in a paper called "Why robots should not be treated like animals," that trading in animal analogies in the way Darling does can be misleading.…”

Rage against robots: Emotional and motivational dimensions of anti-robot attacks, robot sabotage, and robot bullying

“…Numerous science fiction accounts include the demise of robots, often in activities with medieval themes of jousting and direct confrontation and as modern configurations (Bigliardi, 2019;Luria et al, 2020a). Many students have participated in intentionally arranged robot destructions (Black, 2019) with a number of robot-to-robot battles placed on YouTube, which according to reports are sometimes deleted by YouTube administrators because of resemblance of those battles to animal battles. Lewnard (2020) describes such a setting in an educational context: "The Prospect High School Fieldhouse looked like a scaled-down scene out of a 'Mad Max' movie, with marauding robots designed for one taskdestruction" (para.…”

“…Instances of anti-robot attacks are emerging in industrial, community, and service sectors. These attacks often endanger the robots and humans near them despite the efforts of robot developers and robot managers to make robots appealing to humans (Bankins and Formosa, 2020;Black, 2019;Krumins, 2017;Luria et al, 2020b;Sherman, 2018, Torrez, 2019Winfield et al, 2020). This paper focuses on the impact of "emotions" on the problematic relationships between humans and autonomous technologies and on direct human-robot interactions.…”