The Impact of Technology on Human Behavior

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I think there's some interesting issues when it comes to sex robots. I don't believe that sex robots are any sort of replacement for human sexual relationships. But they might be something that, you know, people who don't have human sexual relationships use because they're better than nothing. So I'm not necessarily concerned about humans being replaced here, but I am a little bit concerned about kind of the form factors. And we just don't know whether people's behavior towards sex robots is something that is an outlet for sexual behavior that we don't want performed among humans. Or whether it's something that might perpetuate and normalize the behavior and make them want more of it. We don't know

Most of us have no trouble telling the difference between a robot and a living, feeling organism. Nevertheless, our brains often treat robots as if they were alive. We give them names, imagine that they have emotions and inner mental states, get mad at them when they do the wrong thing or feel bad for them when they seem to be in distress. Kate Darling is a research at the MIT Media Lab who specializes in social robotics, the interactions between humans and machines. We talk about why we cannot help but anthropomorphize even very non-human-appearing robots, and what that means for legal and social issues now and in the future, including robot companions and helpers in various forms. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Kate Darling has a degree in law as well as a doctorate of sciences from ETH Zurich. She currently works at the Media Lab at MIT, where she conducts research in social robotics and serves as an advisor on intellectual property policy. She is an affiliate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Among her awards are the Mark T. Banner award in Intellectual Property from the American Bar Association. She is a contributing writer to Robohub and IEEE Spectrum. Web page Publications Twitter TED talk on why we have an emotional connection to robots See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.