A LITTLE EXPERIMENT: WILL YOU OBEY YOUR ROBOT BOSS?

April 4, 2014
Sogeti Labs

Hey, it’s friday, so why not think about a future in which I for one will obey my robotic overlords. Researchers at the University of Manitoba designed an experiment to see how far people would go in obeying the commands of a robot. The test borrows from Stanley Milgram’s infamous obedience studies, in which many participants obeyed an authority figure who told them to administer painful electrical shocks to strangers.

Half the people sort of do what the robot says. Interesting question in the end: “This is just naming files. … What about morally objectionable tasks?

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