Assertion Supported
Care facilities use therapeutic social robots as alternatives to medication
“They've been able to use these robots as Alternatives to medication for calming distressed patients.”
Assertion Supported
Autonomous weapons create an accountability gap in existing war crime laws
“One of the interesting conversations that's happening right now is around autonomous weapon systems and accountability for harm in settings of war, where we have war crimes, but they require intentionality, and if a robot is committing a war crime, then there'…”
Insight
Nurturing therapeutic robots provides vital psychological benefits to elderly patients
“A lot of people think it's creepy, like we're giving old people robots and like having them nurture something that's not alive, but then you look at some of the advantages of having them have this experience when their lives have been reduced to being taken ca…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Darling: No empirical evidence exists to guide regulatory policy on sex robots
“And the fact is we have no evidence to guide us in what we should be doing.”
Opinion
Darling: Robot regulation debates are distorted by pop culture and sci-fi
“Unfortunately, a lot of the discussions are just fueled by, you know, superstition or moral panic, or in this context, a lot of it is science fiction and pop culture and our constant tendency to compare robots to humans and look at them as human replacements v…”
Insight
Human empathy for animals is based on cuteness and culture, not biology
“We fancy ourselves as caring about, you know, the inner biological workings of the animals and whether animals can suffer, and we actually don't care about any of that. We care about what animals we relate to, and a lot of that is cultural and emotional, and a…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Soldiers' emotional attachment to military robots creates dangerous battlefield hesitation
“In the military, you have soldiers who become emotionally attached to the robots that they work with, and that can be anything from inefficient to dangerous because you don't want them hesitating for even a second to use these machines the way that they're int…”
Insight
Movement and physicality cause humans to project intent onto robots
“With robots, I think they speak to our primal brain even more than like a stuffed animal or some other object that we might anthropomorphize because they combine movement and physicality in this way that makes us automatically project intent onto them.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Consumers name Roombas and insist on repairing the exact same unit
“People will do it even with very, very simple robots, just like the Roomba vacuum cleaner. You know, it's not a very compelling anthropomorphic robot, and yet people will name them and feel bad for them when they get It's stuck and insist on getting the same o…”
Insight
Humans subconsciously treat physical robots like living things, not toasters
“As we integrate these robots into these shared spaces, it's really important to understand that people treat them differently than other devices, and they don't treat them like toasters. They treat them subconsciously like living things”
Insight
Unfamiliar animal designs help social robot users suspend disbelief more easily
“It's also not trying to be A cat or anything that you would be more intimately familiar with, because no one has actually held a baby seal before. Right. And so it's much easier to suspend your disbelief and just, like, go with it.”
Assertion Supported
Giving a robot a name increases human hesitation to harm it
“When the robot's name is Frank, people hesitate more.”
Assertion Supported
Studies measure human brain waves while participants watch robots being tortured
“Other studies have measured people's brain waves while they watch videos of robots being tortured.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Darling: Society will integrate robots similarly to how humans integrated animals
“Throughout history, we've treated some animals as property, as tools, some animals we've turned into our companions, and I think that that is how we're going to start integrating robotic technology as well. We're going to be treating a lot of it like products …”
Assertion Supported
Save the Whales campaign only gained traction after people heard whale songs
“The history of animal rights is full of stories like this, like, The Save the Whales campaign didn't start until people recorded whales singing. Before that, people did not care about whales, but then once we heard that they can sing and make this beautiful mu…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Darling predicts society will manipulate robot designs similarly to animal breeds
“So I think we're gonna see the same types of manipulations of the robot breeds.”
Insight
Animal legal history provides a framework for regulating autonomous, unpredictable robots
“And I think we're forgetting that we have a ton of history with animals where we have things that we've treated as property that can make autonomous, unpredictable decisions that can cause harm.”
Insight
Japan's Shinto history makes cultural acceptance of robots much easier
“Like in Japan, they have this whole history of Shintoism and treating objects as things with souls, and so it's, I think, easier for them to view robots as just another thing with a soul, and they don't have this contradiction inside themselves of, oh, I'm tre…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Japanese manufacturer has assembly line robots do morning aerobics with workers
“There's this company in Japan that has this You know, standard assembly line for manufacturing, and like a lot of companies, they have people working alongside the robots on the assembly line, and so the people will come in and they do these aerobics in the mo…”
Assertion Supported
Hitchbot traversed Canada safely before being vandalized beyond repair in Philadelphia
“There was this robot called Hitchbot that hitchhiked all the way across the entire country of Canada, just relying on the kindness of strangers. It was trying to do a road trip through the U.S., and it made it to Philadelphia, and then it got vandalized beyond…”
Assertion Supported
Soviet WWII anti-tank dog program failed due to unpredictable animal behavior
“For example, the Soviets, they trained dogs to run under tanks, enemy tanks, and they had explosives attached to them, and they were meant to blow up the tanks. And a bunch of things went wrong. So, first of all, they had trained the dogs on their own tank, Wh…”
Kate Darling