#empathy2 #robot #listening @English_4U

But my response to this robot was also interesting because I knew exactly how this machine worked, and yet I still felt compelled to be kind to it. And that observation sparked a curiosity that I’ve spent the past decade pursuing. Why did I comfort this robot? And one of the things I discovered was that my treatment of this machine was more than just an awkward moment in my living room, that in a world where we’re increasingly integrating robots into our lives, an instinct like that might actually have consequences, because the first thing that I discovered is that it’s not just me.” She’s right, it’s not just her. I found a short video on Youtube that shows somebody being really mean to the same type of robot dinosaur that Kate uses in her research. It’s only one minute long, so if you want to pause the podcast and go watch it, feel free. The link is in the show notes. Anyway, when I watched this video myself I felt really uncomfortable, even though I knew it was just a toy robot. I’m not alone; here are some of the Youtube comments. “Why would you do this!!!! It looks so scared, please stop and let me hug it.” “The last part when he was hitting him to the table I heard it crying; that’s so sad.” “I feel bad for him, although I know it’s just a pile of plastic and metal that can’t even think.” Of course, Youtube comments being what they are, there were also people saying things like “This made me laugh so hard,” and “How do I get this job,” but I’m fairly sure those people were just trying to be funny. At least I hope so. We humans have evolved to have empathy for our fellow human beings and for most of us this also extends to animals. Well, cute animals at least. But why in the world would we feel empathy or any kind of emotional connection to a robot, or a machine? I mean, they don’t have emotions or feel pain. They can’t actually have any feelings toward us. Why do we still want to be kind to them? This is what we discuss in the following conversation. You’ll hear me talking to Yasmin, who by the way is an active teacher on italki — there is a link to her profile in the show notes if you would like to get to know her better. She’s from the UK but lives in Canada now, and we got over Zoom to talk about Kate Darling’s presentation, and our own emotional connections to inanimate objects. You’ll hear us starting out with some small talk about podcasts, which leads us naturally into the main topic of our conversation. The small talk is not relevant to our topic, but I’m leaving it in as an example of the natural flow of informal conversations from one topic to another. #empathy2 #robot #listening @English_4U