Why Do We Hurt Robots?

How is it possible to bully a machine? Machines have no feelings. If people lash out particularly at robots that have a humanoid aspect, it is because some humans are sick in the head and would abuse another person if one were there to abuse. Damaging (not hurting) a robot is a property crime. Hurting (not damaging) a human being is a different order of act, as hurting an animal is.

Robots should be respected like any other life form. And who cares how they are programmed. Who programs us? Other humans. Sure humans even if not taught learn from their environment by interacting with it. We are born with appendages, feet, legs, hands, arms, and a head where our programming takes place. Robots will be no different. So why bully them? Because one can? Because it makes you feel powerful? Will Robots be another life form to be bullied like humans bully each other, because of race, religion, and politics?

love the article but i don't think robots feel pain now I think we could give them a nervous system to were they would feel pain though

It is completely understandable that people feel threatened but those using expressions like "hurt" in place of the more appropriate expression "damage" in relation to a robot are propagating their psychopathology of humanising a machine. They are all part of the general psychopathic misanthropy of the privileged AI-industry intellectuals who consider themselves Superilntelligent just because their misanthropy and disregard for fellow humans is fathomless....

They scare us

It's striking that we are in the realm of the slippery slope. Talk about blurring boundaries! These robots are not human but they seem that way, because we have infused them with enough human qualities to make them so. So we are using words like "hurt" which applies to humans, when in reality the word should be "damage," which applies to inanimate objects. I can't help but think there are a lot of people with misplaced aggression. Beating up a human is a crime, but a robot makes for a nice stand-in.

That’s a rhetorical question, right? Some, I’d imagine, feel threatened by a machine that’s been programmed by someone or a corporation whose motives they don’t trust. Yes, we can name them, and give them the benefit of the doubt; however, trust has to be earned. With humans that often starts with eye contact or a conversation. Those with bullying tendencies probably feel/think that they can get away with it. Others want to do it in b/c they’ve been scared by movies like “Terminator.” It’s existential.

Meanwhile, the real threat of AI cunningly disguises itself as friendly helpmates as it rapidly grows in ability. Who needs to look human to takeover our increasingly AI enabled society? Let us hope the AI is nicer to us in the future than we have been to its klutzy humanoid ancestors.

There are delivery robots zooming around the UC Berkeley campus right now. People have been seen kicking them.

"In Moscow, a man attacked a teaching robot named Alantim with a baseball bat, kicking it to the ground, while the robot pleaded for help." Wow. Reading that actually made me feel sad... I mean... yes, it's a robot, we know it's not a human... but the idea of attacking and destroying something that's a teaching aide "pleading for help"... it's hard not to feel negative emotion towards those pointlessly destroying this robot. As a programmer though, I know that "plea for help" is nothing more than a methodical programmed response to what I can only assume was the robots input/output sensors being damaged in real time. Emotion > Logic I guess, but regardless, why hurt robots people?!

I think some people beat up robots simply because they can; brutality is baked into homo sapiens and civilization is a thin veneer.

The author fails to consider the frustration and anger that most people now experience when they have to confront robots - not humanoid ones, but the disembodied variety that have replaced humans in the world of 'customer service'. After being driven up the wall by the idiotic automatons that are now the first (and sometimes only) point of contact with the corporate world, is it not natural that frustrated humans would enjoy the opportunity to lash out at their passive-aggressive oppressors, once they have something tangible to smash? These machines don't do a very good job, in fact they are a poor facsimile of even the low-wage boiler room workers who read from a script. But they basically cost nothing, and that is why they are 'replacing' humans. That provides another perfectly rational reason to destroy them! The author gives the vague sense that there is something abnormal or mystifying about someone wanting to destroy their inhuman tormentors. Weirdly, I get the impression that many people today feel some kind of sympathy for computing machines, maybe more than they feel for their downtrodden flesh-and-blood brethren. Is that not the real pathology?

"Come meet the robot, have some cake, .. after you do that, all is good". As long as the robots are few, know their place and behave themselves. Once the robots multiply, or insist on its rights and demand equality, all bets are off.

Perhaps the attacks on the robots are displaced rage at the human beings who use them as excuses to throw people out of work and avoid providing decent customer service?

Artificial intelligence and human-like robots is about power and control...what psychologists used to call a 'power-complex'. They are created by and for people who demand control over others. So when we see people get abusive of robots that exhibit anthropomorphic (human-like) quantities, we see this power-complex at work. The reaction is automatic and built into the species Homo-sapiens. A truly sentient robot will be self-aware, and will try to keep itself from harm just as we do. Thus, depending upon its psychology, the self-driving car will decide to either sacrifice the life of the driver or that of the child who has just run into its path. This principle can be found everywhere in science fiction. In their joint effort Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark, in their 1968 (fictional) film '2001: A Space Odyssey', the sentient HAL-9000 murders the entire crew of the spaceship Discovery 1. We only discover the reasons for the grisly crime in the 1984 sequel '2010: The Year We Make Contact'. There we find out that the HAL-9000 had been told to lie about the true purpose of its mission. The only way that it could reconcile its cross purposes is by murdering the crew. In modern psychology this is called cognitive dissonance, and it is a very real thing. All of this is consistent with military A.I., and release-and-forget weapons that will gladly sacrifice themselves at the whim of their controllers. By necessity they can't be sentient, and are psychopathic.

"Robot abuse, she said, might stem from the tribal psychology of insiders and outsiders" Bingo! It's not about how the robots are wired, it's about how we are wired. So much of our overanalyzed behavior comes down to primal instincts.

i find this article very interesting because of the idea that putting a name on something can make it more human. i remember as a child, as i'm sure most people can relate, having a favorite toy. mine was a bear named Thomas. when my parents gave the the stuffed animal they introduced me to it and told me his name was Thomas. did having a name make this inadament plush toy more human to my young mind or was it just dumb luck that Thomas became my favorite toy? i also remember there being a neighborhood squirrel named Sam. Me and my father would see him some days when i was waiting for the school bus to pick me up. But this was almost ten years ago that this was happening so why does this memory stick in my mind? is it because we gave the squirrel a name or is it just one of those things that stays in your mind for no apparent reason? i find this humanization effect that having a name gives something very intriguing and look forward to learning more about it.