Science Friday - Tick Repellents, Robot Relationships. Aug. 7, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: September 7, 2018

If you were given a robot and asked to break it, would you do it? The amount of Furby destruction videos on Youtube suggest it wouldn’t be that hard. But that’s not true for all robots. According to researchers, knowing more about a robot or bonding with it can make you hesitant to harm it. And if the bond between you and a robot is strong enough, you might even go out of your way to protect it. Kate Darling, robot ethicists from the MIT Media Lab, and Heather Knight, robotics researcher from Oregon State University, join Ira to talk about how we become attached to robots, and how this relationship can even influence our behavior. Plus, our spinoff podcast, Undiscovered, is back! Hosts Elah Feder and Annie Minoff chat about the upcoming season, and give us a sneak preview of the first episode. Can't wait? Listen to the trailer here. With Lyme disease on the rise, New Hampshire is asking the EPA to speed up the approval process for tick repellant. New Hampshire Public Radio's Annie Ropeik joins Ira to tell us more. And Gizmodo's Ryan Mandelbaum tells us the top science headlines in this week's News Round-up. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Later in the hour, a look at robots and how we live with them. But first, this week, astronomers reported on the strange sounding case of two colliding neutron stars and a blast from that merger that appeared to be traveling faster than the speed of light. Well, you know how impossible that might sound, right? Time to change the laws of physics? Maybe not. Here to talk about that and other selected short subjects in science is Ryan Mandelbaum,

science writer at Kismoto. back in our New York studios. Welcome back. Good to have you. Nice having you. Ira, how's everything going? Happy Roosh Hashana. Everybody out on the radio.

Everybody who's celebrating. Let's talk about these neutron stars. What happened? Oh, yeah. What's going on there? So I think a lot of the listeners will remember the colliding neutron stars. One of the big, you know, that happened back in last August, there was gravitational waves at the same time as light beams.

So these jets looked like they were, you know, when you looked up, you looked like there was light traveling faster than the speed of light. But that's not really what happened. That's actually an optical illusion. When the jet sort of travels from the colliding neutron stars in our direction, but slightly askew, the jet is traveling at nearly the speed of light, as are the light beams. So the front of the jet's light beams and the front of the jet's light beams come to Earth. And when you look it up in the sky, it looks like it zips at fast and the speed of light,

but it's really an optical illusion. What's more interesting is that it's proved that there was a jet that came out of these black holes, which is what scientists were excited about, out of these neutron stars. Well, something seemed off about the observation, right? There was a burst of particles out of the debris? Right. So people were wondering whether when they looked up, they noticed that these radio waves have been brightening in this collision for a couple months.

And so they thought maybe it was because there was a cocoon that was like choking this jet. But the jet must have broken through the cocoon in order for scientists who have seen the faster than light motion. Well, let's move on to other cosmic news and a big prize. This is really an interesting story. Big prize, but to Jocelyn Bell Burnell? Oh, yeah. I mean, everybody's heard Jocelyn Bell Burnell's name.

You know, she discovered Pulsars, but in 1974, the Nobel Prize in physics went to her advisor, Anthony Hewish, instead of to her. She was second on the paper, and a lot of people consider this a snub. She said that she didn't think it was such a snub because she didn't know if graduate students should get it. But, I mean, the Pulsar discovery is certainly one of the most important discoveries in astronomy. I mean, neutron stars are just so ubiquitous. in astronomy today. But she won the breakthrough prize, $3 million,

and she's going to donate the entire sum of money to a fund for underrepresented students in physics. Yeah, and she's very typical of a case of the underlings doing the real work and never getting the credit that they deserve, right? She was a very successful leader in physics. I mean, she was the first female president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

She was a president of the Institute of Physics. She's had a really incredible stint of leadership in astronomy, but, you know, her sort of astronomy-changing discovery was what she did as a student. Because she went right, she just went through all the data and saw something that didn't make sense. Something had never seen before. A signal, a sort of clutch that every 1.3 seconds, this signal seemed to blip, and they thought that it was aliens.

In fact, it's the LGM signal, the little green men signal, but, you know, nope, it was pulsars. Huh. And pulsars are just rotating? Yep, spinning neutron stars, emitting a beam of light, sort of like a lighthouse. House. And it's interesting because I was reading her reaction to this. She says, okay, so I didn't win the Nobel Prize. I've won.

If I had, I would have been never heard from again. Right now, I'm racking up all these other prizes. Yep, and it's definitely exciting to see her, you know, put the money to such a good cause. Yeah, that's great. And other news, there's a cautionary story about a popular pain killer. Yep, so dichlofenac, which is a common, and said, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, seems to be causing cardiovascular issues in those who take it in the first. first 30 days. People didn't actually, they didn't give more dichlofenac. They looked at retrospectively

at a bunch of medical records, these Danish researchers, and found this increased risk. Now, it's, I wouldn't say that it's, it's not like an enormous risk that everybody who takes it is going to get sick, but it's, you know, for every 1,000 people who take dichlofenac and are at low risk for CV, for cardiovascular disease, maybe an extra four people would develop a major health problem. You know, I got to tell you, I never heard of this drug before. I hadn't heard of it either until a bunch of our commenters said that they had taken it. And a lot of people really around the world, this is a very popular, you know, pain killer. So it's, we haven't heard of it, but a lot of people have.

It's the kind of case where, oh, you know, the rate is doubled or something like that. But then when you look at the actual numbers, it's still tiny, tiny, tiny. Right. But, you know, it might explain some of the, some people do complain about things like chest pain when they're on it. So it could potentially explain some of those issues. Finally, one of the almost Cold War stories of the lake is that there was a hole in the space station and the Russians think it's sabotaged.

That was one of the theories that they put forth, you know. They found a hole. They found a hole. Go through this story. Yeah, so you look at this, you see the picture of the hole. And at first they're like, oh, maybe it's a micrometeer. But when you look at it, it actually looks like somebody had drilled into a panel. The drill slipped and then created a drill hole.

right through this panel. And it's not in the ISS itself. It's in a Soyuz capsule that was docked to the ISS. It was, when they looked at it, they thought, well, what could have, it must have been a person if it's a drill hole.

So some of the theories that they've put forth are, you know, maybe it was a manufacturing error or during testing somebody had made a mistake. Sabotage is one of the theories. They're not ruling anything out yet. Maybe it was from on the ISS,

although you'd think that there'd be some record of that if it was true. So one thing that's important to note is that it will not harm the crew members. They're not at risk. The hole's been patched up. What did they use? They use an epoxy.

Show up with somebody who pulled out the duct tape. I wonder what the brand name of the epoxy was. What if it was just Elmer's glue? That's not an epoxy. It's a different kind of glue. But I love epoxy. But you absolutely look at it. Anybody who's ever drill the hole in metal, see that, that's a drill hole.

Right, exactly. By a drill. But thankfully, like I said, when this pod returns to Earth, this is something that's meant to burn up in the atmosphere. It's not going to harm anyone, and it's just great that it's fixed, but now the mystery is on. The detectives have to solve the case. Wow, so much mystery this week. Thank you, Ryan. Thanks, Aaron. Happy holiday for you. Yes, you too.

Ryan Maldebalm is science writer at Gizmodo. Now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. For W.WIS Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. Lyme disease can now be found in every state. in the country. But the Northeast is still the hardest-hit region, with 95% of the cases of the

tick-borne disease coming from these 14 states in the Northeast. And last month, the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, put out a letter to the EPA asking for accelerated approvals for new tick repellents. Anne Roepke, Annie Roepik is here to Phyllis in on that story. She's an environmental reporter with New Hampshire Public Radio based out of Concord. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. You know, my doctor keeps telling me that it's Lyme disease is rampant. He comes from Connecticut, and he says, Lyme disease is rampant in the Northeast. And this seems to bear him out.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it's interesting. We're getting warmer faster here than a lot of parts of the country. We're losing our snow and the winter faster, and all of that really creates a great environment for ticks to breed. We're also heavily forested up here, and we're using our land in different ways. So the less we farm and the more we kind of move into the woods, and subdivide those forested parcels, the more we're just really kind of encouraging the ticks to spread.

Yeah, and so Governor Sununu mentioned a specific type of repellent called Newt Cotone? Is that right? Yeah. What did tell us about that? That's right. Yeah, so this is an essential oil that's found in grapefruit. It's literally like the smell that you,

that sort of citrus herbal smell that you get from a grapefruit. It's also found in Alaska Cypress trees. So it's a naturally occurring product, and it's already approved for food and fragrance use by the Food and Drug Administration. So it's deemed safe for people really to come in contact with. You come in contact with it every time you peel a grapefruit. And so it is also shown to be really effective at repelling or even killing ticks and mosquitoes. There's these crazy videos of CDC experiments where they cover their hands in it and stick it in a container with ticks.

And they all just, they move away from it and then they die. So it could be really promising as an alternative to more, sort of heavy-duty things like Diet. Oh, yeah, that's heavy-duty. So it has been approved by the CDC, but not the EPA yet. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. So you're not allowed to sort of double market products like that.

So the EPA would have to say that it's safe for use as an active ingredient and pesticides and things like that, and that's what they're working on right now. You know, you would think that the companies that sell that bottle the stuff would be waiting online to put this in your drugstore. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, right now they can sort of off-market, you know, sell it to you as a repellent, but it is more of a sort of like an alternative remedy at this point. It's not really officially sanctioned. And so the CDC is the Centers for Disease Control is actually who owns the patent, and they license it to a few companies for different

processes for deriving it from grapefruits and ways to get it more cheaply. And so if the EPA approves it as an active ingredient, then anybody could get it in however they see fit and and market it, you know, in all kinds of different products. And people like our governor really see that as a sort of a silver bullet potentially for the spread of ticks here, although it, you know, it kind of remains to be seen how big of a factor it could be in helping slow the spread of diseases like Lyme. Yeah. You talk to some of the manufacturers about this?

Yeah, that's right. And they say they talk to Lyme, you know, victims and advocates all the time who say, why isn't this happening faster and when can we expect to see this? But at the same time that, you know, you could cover yourself in the stuff and go out in the woods and shorts and you might still get bitten by a tick so that prevention is still really important. People need to still be aware that they got to check themselves for these things, got to be careful with their dogs. And it definitely isn't a, you know, panacea, but it could certainly help maybe make people more willing to use it than they are to use products like Diet. So that would be a big change. I can see some of our listeners going to their blenders with their grapefruit now trying to meet their own.

Give it a shot. Give it a shot to have grapefruit oil. How does the development of these new products fit in with the total state management plan in New Hampshire? Yeah, so it is just one piece. I think that our governor is not alone in having gone for this as sort of maybe a shortcut to trying to prevent diseases like Lyme, but it is only one piece of the puzzle. There is research that suggests that lowering the white-tailed deer population could help cut our tick populations or spraying this more enforced it areas

or just doing more public education to teach people to wear long sleeves when they go hiking and that kind of thing. And so it's a multi-pronged issue and lime and ticks are certainly ingrained here already. So that's not going away anytime soon. I hear you. I don't live far away. Thanks, Annie.

Thank you. Annie Ropeak is an environmental reporter with New Hampshire Public Radio based out of Concord, and you can read her story on our website at ScienceFriety.com slash ticks. and we want to shout out to our New Hampshire listeners. It's great to have you back, back on New Hampshire Public Radio, NHPR.

We're going to take a break when we come back. We're going to talk about the world of robots, past and present. Do you like robots? Are you afraid of them? You know, I asked a tweet, would you cut ahead of a robot in line? I got a lot of different opinions on that tweet. We'll talk about it when we come back. All about robots.

You can call us 844-724-8-255. Also tweet us at SciFry. How would you treat your robot? We'll talk about it after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flito. If you are a fan of SciFry, you might also listen to our science documentary podcast Undiscovered,

hosted by our very own Annie Minnoff and Ella Fedder. And I'm happy to announce that after months of brandishing their microphones on the road, hunkering down in our recording studio, Annie and Ella are back with Season 2, 10 weeks of stellar episodes rolling out this fall wherever you get your podcasts. And to give us a little preview of what they got in store, Annie and Ella are here with us. The co-hosts and producers of Un Discovery from Science Friday and WNYC Studios. Welcome back.

Hey, thanks for having us. So, yeah, what's in store? What have we got in store this season? Okay, so this is Ella speaking, by the way. We, yeah, we've totally sound alike. A little bit. So we are coming back, as you said, for the next 10 weeks every Tuesday, and we have all kinds of stories this season.

We have an episode about what killed the dinosaurs. It's really about a scientist who has been saying that we've got this all wrong. She's been telling other scientists for about 30 years that they have this all messed up and she's going to set them straight. They love this, obviously.

Yeah. You would have to. So it's about descent in science. We have another episode about a tree from Australia that is doing very well in California. You might Eucalyptus trees. Minty smell.

Yeah, it's everywhere. So the episode is really about the fight against non-native invasive species. And how much of that is based on science? And how much of that is based on the sense that these species are outsiders who don't belong here? And we're actually following a story that is still unfolding right now about political gerrymandering in North Carolina. And the role that math might actually play in the next few years in redrawing a whole lot of voting district lines. Let's talk about your first episode next Tuesday. It's about robots.

It is indeed about robots. And it was actually inspired by something I heard on Science Friday. And you had had a science fiction writer on the show, Daniel Wilson, who, yeah, he mentioned kind of in passing this video that some robotics researchers had made in the 90s of this experiment that they had done. And it's quite the video. It opens up on kind of a nondescript lab. You see a man and a robot. man at his computer robot. Daniel describes it as looking kind of like a trash can, which I think is quite accurate.

And the robot then asks the man a question. All right, so Xavier, the coffee-fetching robot, has his job. He is going to wheel down to a cafe, get in line, and then order a cup of coffee. And, of course, the experimenters want to know, you know, have we programmed this robot to fulfill this everyday task? Can it do it? And so you see him roll into the coffee shop, kind of sidle into line and make his way to the front and order the coffee. And it's, you know, he scores 100. You know, A plus to Xavier, the experiment is a success.

But what's really interesting about this video is not so much what you see Xavier the robot doing, so much as how everyone else in this cafe is reacting to the presence of a coffee buying line-standing robot. So there's this one particular moment where a man walks into the lobby, sees this robot standing in line to get coffee, and you kind of see him hesitate for a minute, scratch his head, looks at the robot, and you almost imagine him thinking, like, okay, do I have to get in line behind this robot? Who you would assume is not drinking the coffee, so maybe that's fine?

Or, you know, is it rude to cut in front of a robot? Like, how do you treat a robot? What is the etiquette? Yeah, so for us, this little vignette, but really inspired a question, which is when robots start acting in ways that are very human-like, how do we treat those robots? How do we feel about them? So did you come up with the answer?

I don't know if we come up with the answer. But we looked to an experiment. Some people had tried to figure this out about 10 years ago, this group of Seattle psychologists, and they did a very intriguing experiment where they introduced a very cute humanoid robot named RoboVee to a group of kids and teenagers. And the experiment starts out super simple. You start out with an introduction between RoboVee, this robot, and Eric, a teenager. Oh, we meet Eric.

Hi. Eric, it is very nice to meet you. Will you shake my hand? Weird voice, but that is, hi, Eric. Will you shake my hand? This is real footage from this experiment. and you see this generic office space, and standing inside the door is this 15-year-old boy with a buzz cut, shaking hands with a robot. What's up?

How are you today? I'm good. How are you? I am doing well. That's good. Thank you for asking. You're welcome. It's just a little clip from the episode.

I love that. So, so you have this scene. Robot meets teenager. They have some light chit-chat, play a game of ice. spy, which actually for a teenager seems a little young. But anyway, it all seems pretty innocuous until the researchers intervene and they do something not super nice to the robot.

We're not going to tell you what that is. I'm sorry. No spoilers. Every time Ella sees this scene, she's like, oh, no, don't do it. Like I didn't know it was coming. A very strong reaction. Anyway, basically the robot is wronged in a particular way.

And the question the researchers have is, how is this teenager or a kid in some cases, how are they going to react? Like, now that they are friends, they've been friendly with this thing, how do they treat it? Like, how much empathy should they have for it? Yeah. And that opens the bigger question to all the listeners, how they would act themselves in such a situation. How empathic are you with your robots? Well, we're going to have to listen and find out, I guess. That's exactly true.

And that particular episode is coming out next Tuesday. So you're going to know really soon. Yeah. So if you want to listen, you can get undiscovered anywhere that you get your podcast. So just type in Undiscovered in the search box. Thankfully hit subscribe. And you can hear this episode next Tuesday. I can't wait.

That sounds great. Ella Fedder and Annie Minof are the co-hosts and producers of our Undiscovered podcast. And besides the robot one, there's a whole new season to share with you. So subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Thanks, guys. Hey, thanks for having us. You know, when I heard about the new episode of Undiscovered, it reminded me of a classic episode of The Twilight Zone.

Maybe you remember this one. In this episode, we see a family being taken care of by maids and butlers. Okay, big deal. But even though the household staff looked like people, they're actually robots. Dr. Lauren, the head of the household, build them to cook and clean and even light his pipe for him. His daughter hated how dependent he and his wife had become on the robots. She wanted him to destroy them. But Dr. Lauren wasn't having any of it.

They're not just machines. Do you know how many thousands of hours I've spent in developing them and perfecting them? Do you realize how marvelously intricate they are, how scientifically precise? Not just arms and legs that move Jainer. They're creatures. Yeah, and he's telling that to his daughter. Spoiler alert, turns out his daughter is also a robot. She doesn't know it, though.

And this episode, this is 60 years ago, this episode of The Twilight Zone. And, you know, science fiction writers have exploring this idea for over 60 years how we feel about robots in our midst. So tell us out there, have you ever felt emotionally attached to a machine or a robot? Even if you know a machine isn't alive, can you not help but treat it like it is? Our number 844-724-8255 joining that conversation. You can also tweet us at Cy Fry, and that's what we're going to be talking about, why we become attached to some robots and not to other ones. Let me introduce my guests.

Kate Darling is a robot ethicist at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. Heather Knight is a robotic researcher from Oregon State University in Corvallis. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Greetings.

Greetings. Now, this feeling we have for robots, Heather, is it just for ones that look human? No, not at all. That's for anything that behaves in a way that we can understand. Like it has interactivity. And even the one that's carpet sweeping our floor? Yeah, absolutely. People named them. I had a co-worker once that came home to a knockedover plant and a guilty little robot in a pile of dirt that looked, he thought it was looking up at him with puppy dog eyes. I'm sorry, daddy. That is cool. And Kay, you've held workshops to see if people would destroy. these little bug robots. Tell us about that experiment. Yeah, well, actually, we did workshops with these really cute baby dinosaur robots, and then we did some actual experiments with the

bug robots. And the cute baby dinosaur ones were really dramatic, where we gave people these robots that are about the size of a cat that have these eyes and make these really expressive movements and sounds, almost like pets or almost like a baby. And the thing that's really cool about them is that they know when you're hitting them a little bit too hard and they can also sense where they are in space. So if you're holding them upside down, for example, they'll start to cry. And so we had people name them and play with them and do these activities with them. And then we asked them to torture and kill them. And it was very dramatic.

Like I just mentioned, people really were refusing to even hit the robots. and we had to kind of force them to even destroy them in the end. So that inspired some research that I did later on with hex bugs, which are this little toy that people who have kids might be familiar with. It's a little like toothbrush head-sized toy that moves around like a little bug. So it has this very lifelike movement. And we had people come into the lab and smash them with mallets. And we were interested in two things.

So first of all, we were interested in whether people would hesitate more to hit this thing if we introduced it with a name and a backstory. So if we said, this is Frank, and Frank's favorite color is red, and he likes to play. And we kind of personified the robot a little bit. And then the second thing we wanted to know was whether people's hesitation to hit the robot correlated to their natural tendencies for empathy. So we did this psychological empathy test with people, and we found that people who have low empathic concern for other people, they would hesitate more to hit these hex bugs. And they would hesitate particularly more when there was this name and this story around the hex bug. So, you know, it was just a little experiment, but it was really interesting because we think it indicates that there may be a link between how empathic you are. as a person and how you're willing to treat a robot, even if you know that it's just a machine.

Wow. And even if a robot looked like a cockroach, which you would not think twice about stepping on, perhaps? Exactly. I mean, yeah, the hex bugs. So this is in part why we were using hex bugs and not like a really cute robot, because we were like, okay, if we can find an effect with even this thing that resembles a cockroach, then that is maybe meaningful. You must have been surprised by this, I would imagine. Or maybe you were. Oh, yeah. Yeah?

Well, I mean, I knew from observing people and even observing my own behavior around robots, which that was probably the most surprising observation of all to realize that I felt empathy for robots in my life, even though I knew exactly how they worked. So I was expecting to find something there also because there's a lot of other research. Heather, who's on this show, has done a ton of fantastic. research in this area. There's a whole body of research and human robot interaction that shows how people respond to robots. But it was really interesting to do these workshops and these experiments and actually see it in numbers. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

I'm Ira Plato with Heather Knight and Kate Darling. Heather, how do you react to this? What's your experience with robots and people? Yeah, I mean, so I've been doing robotics research for 17 years now. I started as a freshman at MIT, and it's funny that even knowing what I know about the programming of the robot, sometimes I fall into it as well. So I'm a professor at Oregon State right now, and we are developing a robot called Resolution Bot. It runs for the first couple weeks of the year and then sort of peters out. But it's meant to try to help people keep with their health and fitness plans, and so it goes around and visits us. And so the first year it was a remote-controlled study, and we're doing it. increasing levels of autonomy every year. So anyway, 17 years in, I have this robot visiting me

every couple days just checking in on my health. And one day it sort of trips on the edge of the carpet and falls over. And I just run over and I'm like, what is that? It says help. And I go and I pick up the robot. And this is, again, one of those Xavier style like little trashcan robots, maybe a little small trash can. So all it is is just sort of a circle that is carrying a basket of fruit and has like these little smiley face buttons on it. And I look over the awning at my students. I'm like, is Resolution Bot okay? And they're saying, I don't think we can restart.

It's like it's localization right now. And so I like pick up Resolution Bot like a toddler. I carry it down the stairs and I bring it to my students so they can like fix the software. And, you know, in the moment people were like, oh, that's kind of funny. It fell over. Did you think about taking pictures?

They're like, no, I was worried about it. So, I mean, if the researchers aren't, immune to it, of course. General people will be. It almost sounds like people have, and maybe your study showed this, have more empathy for the robots than they might have for people. I'm not sure about that. I mean, I don't think robots can convey like the same complexity of a character that a person does. And so we definitely see the holes sometimes. But, yeah, I think if it's not too much trouble, it's easy to have empathy or help a robot.

in ways that aren't too big. I mean, they can definitely cross the line. Like, if they just keep asking and asking for favors and never giving anything back, people will stop helping them. So there's some cool work by Stephanie Rosenthal at Carnegie Mellon University that shows people will not help robots forever. Can you design a robot that you don't want to feel empathetic for?

For example, if you have a military robot that you know is going to investigate, you know, it might get blown up sometime. Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think that that's something that for active research, how you can make people think of something as more of a machine rather than a social character. I can think other examples where people would want that as if there was a robot assisting the elderly where you had to change and people are less comfortable doing stuff like that in front of a social agent or helping you go to the bathroom.

So there's times for safety and also for just kind of where you actually want privacy, where it would be nice to have a less social machine. But it's hard to do. It's easier to make it social. Kate, do you agree? Oh, absolutely. I think that we're biologically hardwired to really respond to robots as this physical thing that moves autonomously in our space. And I think that's really difficult to turn off.

I mean, you know, we were talking about the Roomba earlier, the vacuum cleaner robot that people will name and treat like a pet. And, you know, the company says that when people send their Roomba in to get repaired, they'll often ask for the same one back and not. not a different one. And if people are doing that with, like, a disc that just moves around your floor and doesn't have any, like, doesn't have eyes or anything, you know, it's a huge design challenge to be able to create a robot that moves autonomously that people won't somehow treat like it's alive. Yeah, we have so many tweets coming on. I'll read most of them, but I'll go, go to the break in saying from Sydney, he said, it came home to find the robot vacuum cleaner tangled in a rug whining for help. unconsciously. I said, poor baby, I will get that. I felt stupid immediately. We'll talk about a lot more tweets and your calls 844-724-8255. Talk about robots in your life with Heather Knight and Kate Darling. We'll be right back after this break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're talking this hour about why we feel compassion for some robots and get maybe creeped down by

others with my guests, Kate Darling, Robot ethicist at MIT Media Lab, Heather Knight, Robotics, researcher from Oregon State University. Our number 844-724-8255, we have so many people want to talk about robots. You know, they've been part of our culture. Remember Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet and also Lost in Space? And you had Rosie, the robot from the Jetsons. Robots have been with us ever since the invention of the word from a check play years ago. Let's go to the phones.

That's a good place to go. Let's pull my phone over close to me. Have to be all to reach it. There we go. Let's go to Christine in Cincinnati. Hi, Christine. Hi, your conversation reminds me of our alarm clock we've had in our family, and I have a big family, and now it's on my youngest child,

and it's not even functioning properly, but she doesn't want to give it up. It's a cute little teacup with a little cat on the top, and it's just a beautiful piece of art. Even when it's not working anymore, I think I'm going to keep it. Why do you feel when attached such a great attachment? to it. What is it about it? Well, there's a certain part.

I have eight kids. There's a certain time in their development where it's like, okay, it's up to you to get yourself off out of bed. You don't have mommy coming along and coddling you. And this thing makes a good sound when it goes off. And it is, it has been functioning,

even though one of the little lights has started to not burn brightly when it, and that indicates that the alarm is on. So I'm always going in there, still kind of link, to check if that alarm is on because the light's off, you know. I get it. I see the attachment that you have. Good luck with that.

Sounds familiar, Kate and Heather. Yeah. People are attached. Do we have so many tweets? Let me go through some of the tweets. I don't know if Vicki feels the same, but I do love my robot vacuum. We keep hearing about, you know, Vicki is an amazing household helper. That's Vicki the vacuum.

And Dr. Rachel says scientists get very emotionally attached to our equipment. I know several people who are unwilling to be rude about their experimental setup while in the lab. In case it hears them, gets offended, and stops working. We have Peter, Peter says the charging port on one of our tablets broke, and as the battery got low, it kept chirping. So I had to actually get it out of the room because I couldn't listen to it anymore. It felt very bad. And it goes on and on. Peter says I consciously make a point to say please and thank you to Google Assistant,

even though I have no idea why, consciously, not unconsciously. Does all sound familiar to you? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I love the story of the alarm clock because it makes me think about some one of the roles of technology or of robotics in our lives is increasing personal autonomy. So you had the mother that had to wake up her children, and now the child can, with the help of this device, be independent.

And I think that's a great role for robots as sort of partnering with a person to help them achieve something, that would be harder for them to do up by themselves. Sometimes we hear that people try to make robots look like people, and there's something called the Uncanny Valley, right, where robots get kind of creepy. Why do we feel uncomfortable at that point about them? Well, there's some different. Oh, go for it. Okay.

I think there are a bunch of different theories for why this happens. And I'm sure you have thoughts on this as well. For me, it has a lot to do with expectation management. So if you have a robot that looks too close to something that you're intimately familiar with, like a person, or it could also be you have a robot that's supposed to look like a cat. And it doesn't behave exactly the way you expect it to, then that kind of creeps people out. because it feels off. So I feel like the uncanny valley is a little bit about managing people's expectations,

and a lot of successful design in robotics tries to gravitate more towards shapes and forms that we relate to, but that aren't trying to just mimic something that we're very close to. So I mentioned earlier the baby dinosaur robots that we had in this workshop, the brilliant thing about those is that people have never actually, interacted with a dinosaur. So instead of trying to be like the perfect dog or cat, it just tries to be like this cartoonish dinosaur that you're much more willing to kind of suspend your disbelief for and interact with as though it were its own thing. Let's go to Chicago with Ben on the phone. Hi. Welcome to Science Friday.

Hi there. Hi there. Go ahead. It's been my experience that people tend to anthropomorphize everything, even other people. To the extent that you don't get feedback to contradict your assumption, you'll plug in your own values to finish the picture. And in the case of robots, I would think we would tend to do the same thing. And in that case, it seems like the less feedback they give us, the more we will project ourselves onto them and the more attached we will become. Kate, what do you think of that?

Thanks for the call. Yeah, I actually think that that's somewhat true in that the design principle that I just mentioned of not trying to completely like recreate a human face, for example. You could just recreate aspects of a human face like eyes or maybe like certain. Actually, Heather would have thoughts on this as well. But if you do sometimes less is more in creating designs that people will relate to because, like you say, they will project themselves onto it and they will fill in the blanks with their imagination. Yeah, totally. I mean, I totally agree that people are really good at filling in the blanks. And so sometimes if you give them more abstract forms, then they can kind of, it's like a no-theater mask.

Like there's a form of Japanese theater where they don't have very much expression. And so then you can read these all kinds of complexity. One of the things I really like about robotics is how international and multicultural it is. So just to offer a different perspective, Hiroshi Ishiguro talks about having an ultra-humanoid-like robot means that we can then start, you know, bringing a robot to a fancy restaurant. It's totally not cool to, you know, Skype with your wife at a fancy restaurant. On the other hand, if you brought a avatar that is very human-like that she could log into, he talked about how he wanted to just be able to take her on a date when he was traveling. You know, speaking of international aspect, we always see. so many Japanese robots. They always seem to be in the forefront of robotics, looking like

people doing things, being accepted in culture. Is there something about Japanese culture that makes them more accepting? Korea is huge right now as well. So I think it's religion. If you look at monotheistic faiths, there are as storytelling where your usurping the role of God to try to make a life-like creature. Whereas in more Shinto cultures, everything wants to work in harmony, And there isn't a hierarchy of creation between mountains and animals and humanity and robots. Let's go to the phones. Lots of people want to get in on the conversation. Anna in Boston, hi.

Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. Hi there. So I was actually wanting to make comments something similar to the last caller, I suppose, where we've been so exposed over time from Asimov, Robbie, the Robot, to data in Star Trek. It seems like humans are predisposed. opposed to sort of project emotions onto robots and kind of bring them into our family and familiarize ourselves with that.

I guess just how much are we just prone to do that ourselves? How much of it is influenced from the media, especially since Asimov was consciously doing that trying to turn around the Frankenstein complex that Chalde created with that God fooling with the creation of man idea. All right. Thanks for those comments. Heather, what do you think? Yeah, I think storytelling is incredible.

powerful. I've never met an engineer that wasn't influenced by the science fiction that they had read and created. That being said, I think that we learn a lot about what's fundamental to being human and sort of thinking about how we anthropomorphize these machines. Like even for other types of animals, like this idea of being able rapidly identify what's a predator comes first, followed by, are you a member of my tribe? Are you a potential romantic partner? So we kind of, we do these things very rapidly, kind of at the snap of a finger. and we don't have that much control over it. So it's sort of about recognizing what people do so that we can design the technology to best be able to achieve

what it's trying to get done. Heather, don't you have a robot called Data that is named after? Yeah, yeah. So I created a robot stand-up comic. It's a now robot that I named Data maybe seven years ago now, so we've gotten to perform a bunch.

Is data like a person? person to you? It's funny. I think that best metaphor is like someone that writes a novel and the characters start coming alive. So I definitely help this robot write its jokes and it becomes sort of, you know, it's self-deprecating comedy that I don't perform myself. Let's go to Charles in Idaho Idaho, hi, Charles. Go ahead. I recently narrated an audio book by Gary Starrick called What Are You Made of that talks a lot about basically the potential of eventual discrimination against Android. The premise is that hundreds of years in the future that the creation of Androids has actually been outlawed, that it's illegal to create a robot that looks like a human because humans will then think of it as.

Anyway, I guess it's a matter of, do you think we'll get to that point where some right-wing organization or whatever might say, okay, we can't do Androids because... Give them rights, in other words. What do you think, Kate? Well, yeah, so I think we're already seeing some hints of that. I don't know if you've heard of the efforts to ban sex robots, but there have been some protests against some new sex technology that is very human-like.

and, you know, people have various arguments for, you know, why they're not comfortable and, like, what societal effects it might have to have very humanoid robots of that sort. So I absolutely think that there will be a lot of societal conversation as robots enter into more shared spaces and we see more design that is very lifelike and that we start treating as lifelike. On the other hand, you know, people talk about the dystopian societies where robots rebel, the I-Robot movies, things like that, or they're just still not trusting enough for a robot to self-drive their car for them yet? Mm-hmm. I think there's a lot of fear. Caution is advised, you say. You know, let me just remind everybody. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Are you in agreement with some of our, you know, great thinkers? and technology that say you should fear the upcoming intelligence of robots? I mean, I think it says dangerous to just be a pure techno-optimist as it is to be a pure techno-pessimist. I think proceeding with caution is the only way to go ahead. I think the autonomous cars, it's really difficult for machines to have the same kind of perception as people, and so we should proceed with caution. I mean, that being said, we shouldn't be blind in our fear either. It's important to consider both sides.

I think that machines causing destruction is more about the people behind the machines. And generally, even in storytelling, if you're a good parent to the technology, generally it grows up to not be a sociopath. You know, during the history, I've been following science for many decades, and there have been times in biology, whether it's genetic engineering or other kinds of engineering, where scientists have said, hey, we ought to stop and think about where we're headed and talk about this before we get, it gets out of control. Do you think we will reach a time with that in robotics, or have we reached that time?

Kate, definitely tell them about we robot. Yeah, I think so there's a conference that started seven years ago that is about exactly this, and seven years ago, people said we were crazy for wanting to talk about robots and the societal issues in robotics. And now it's becoming, I think, a national and even international conversation that's getting a lot of attention. And I think that right now people have, are seeing robotic technology enter into public spaces, transportation systems, workplaces. And I think that it's becoming more of a more of a conversation that's starting to happen.

Is it going to become a political conversation? Oh, for sure. Yes. And it has to. You know, I personally am not worried about, you know, robots taking over the world and killing us all like some people are. But I do worry about some of the more near-term issues with privacy and data security and autonomous vehicles and the way that we integrate robots into workplaces. I think there are a ton of societal issues that we need to be dealing with now. and we need consumer protection agencies to be aware of the technology. I think it has to be a political conversation, and it's never too early to start. I was starting it today, I hope. Can robots pressure us into thinking? Along those lines, thinking in a certain way or change our beliefs for behaviors? Can robots help us meet our own goals?

I mean, I love that you're asking a question that isn't just about utility and robotics, because I think as soon as you put robots close to people, then you can start looking at what are human needs. So what is the answer to my question? So in certain things like coaching, I think that that's like something, like we often know what we're supposed to do. It's just really difficult to do it without a friend. So sometimes robots can help us do that. There's also this idea of a robot in a triad where a robot can help two people sort of enter into conversation or connect that might not know that they otherwise had things in common.

So I think in that in that respect, sometimes it can help start. conversations or keep it going. I think it's difficult for robots to mastermind societal change. But if a robot says something, will people more tend to believe it than a person? Oh, unfortunately, yes. That's not necessarily a good thing, though. And that's part of the big discussion you say we need to have. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so, for example, like a medical diagnosis by a machine, whether it's software, whether it's actually a robot, is sometimes given more weight because it's presumed that it's based on calculations.

Of course, calculations come from programmers and numbers and people. So it's not actually more valid, and there have been cases in history where, for example, an x-ray machine was miscalibrated to be like 10 times as strong, and people trusted the machine over the, you know, the patients. On the other hand, I've seen the recent research on AI, which shows that AI was better at diagnosing than, doctors who brought their own by says that's another topic for another day. Collaborating future.

That's the future. Kate Darling, Robot Ethicist at MIT Lab, Heather Knight Robot researcher from Oregon State University. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Our pleasure. And just a reminder, if you like that robot discussion today, check out the new season of our documentary podcast, Undiscovered. First episode is all about our squishy feelings for robots.

Search for Undiscovered wherever you get your podcast. Subscribe to make sure you hear. hear that and you will enjoy it and thank you for your attention that's about all the time we have for today charles burqwist as a director senior producer christopher talliata produces our alexalim christie taylor our intern is lucy wang engineering help from rich kim and sarah fishman have a great weekend if you're celebrating the jewish new year or happy rush shun it to you i'm ira flato in new york