At a 2013 robotics conference the MIT researcher Kate Darling invited attendees to play with animatronic toy dinosaurs called Pleos, which are about the size of a Chihuahua. The participants were told to name their robots and interact with them. They quickly learned that their Pleos could communicate: The dinos made it clear through gestures and facial expressions that they liked to be petted and didn’t like to be picked up by the tail. After an hour, Darling gave the participants a break. When they returned, she handed out knives and hatchets and asked them to torture and dismember their Pleos.
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As machines evolve from tools to teammates, the author writes, accepting them will be more than a matter of simply adopting some new technology.
The first challenge will be recognizing when computers know more than we do. “Algorithm avoidance,” for instance, makes people prefer human judgment over that of machines and can lead to worse decisions, from diagnosing patients to predicting political outcomes. The message for managers is that helping humans to trust thinking machines will be essential.
One way to encourage that trust is to make robots more humanoid. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon explored this idea with an autonomous robot named Snackbot, which had wheels, arms, a male voice, and an LED mouth that could smile and frown. People in the office made conversation with it and treated it with kindness. But this approach may lead us to put too much faith in the machines’ abilities.
How we work with thinking machines will vary according to the work we’re doing, how it’s framed, and how the machines are designed. But under the right conditions, people are surprisingly open to a robotic colleague.
HBR Reprint R1506F