Researchers Tortured Robots To Test The Limits Of Human Empathy

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"It was quite a setback, and we didn't really expect it," hitchBOT co-creator Frauke Zeller told CNN at the time .

"Most people had no problem shaking a silent robot, but as soon as the robot began to make pitiful sounds, they chose to do the boring task instead," Wieringa said in a statement . Wieringa will be defending the research as part of her PhD thesis at Radboud University in November.

Those findings build off previous research that shows we may treat robots kinder when they appear to exhibit a range of human-like tendencies. Participants in one study, for example, were less inclined to strike a robot with a hammer if the robot had a backstory describing its supposed personality and experiences. In another case, test subjects were friendlier to humanoid-shaped robots after they used a VR headset to "see" through the machine's perspective. Other research suggests humans may be more willing to empathize with or trust robots that appear to be able to recognize their own emotional state.

Humans have a long history of taking out our frustrations on inanimate objects. Whether it's parking meters, vending machines, or broken toaster ovens, people have long bizarrely found themselves attributing human-like hostility to everyday objects, a phenomenon the writer Paul Hellweg refers to as " resentalism ." Before more modern conceptions of robots, people could be seen attacking parking meters and furiously shaking vending machines . As machines became more complex, so too did our methods for destroying them. That penchant for robot destruction was maybe best encapsulated in the popular 2000s television show Battle Bots , where crowds cheered as quickly cobbled together robots were repeatedly sliced, shredded, and lit on fire before a cheering crowd.

Now, with more consumer-grade robots roaming around in the real world, some of those exuberant attacks are taking place on city streets. Autonomous vehicles operated by Waymo and Cruise have been vandalized and had their tires slashed in recent months . One Waymo vehicle was even burned to the ground earlier this year .