The Ledger
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why aren't all 7 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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…”
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.”
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”
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.”
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.”
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…”