Rise of the Machines gaat door: Mensen soms bereid mensenlevens op te offeren om robot te redden.
10 February 2019
20:45
”The central question of the research was the extent to which people are prepared to sacrifice robots to save human lives. The test subjects were presented with a moral dilemma and the question of whether they would sacrifice an individual to save a group of wounded people. In the different scenarios, the individual was a person, a robot with human traits, or a robot that was presented as a simple machine.
The research indicated that the more the robot was seen as human, the more difficult the dilemma was for the test subjects. When the robot was presented as a conscious being with its own thoughts, experiences, pain, and emotions, the test subjects were less likely to sacrifice the robot in favour of anonymous people. According to Nijssen, this means that people, under certain conditions, endow robots with moral value. “A human-looking robot can cause feelings and behaviours that contrast with the function for which they were developed – to help us. And the question is whether this is desirable for us.””
