Can A Person Really Fall In Love With A Robot?
The real answer might surprise Sci-fi fans.
If you don’t like people and dream about the days when you’ll be able to have a robot to keep you company, science says you might not be as enamored with your new buddy as you’d hoped.
Human/robot relationships might not be as effortless as they seem, as your brain might not fall in love with (or even like) your human-looking machine as much as you’d think.
Researchers have discovered that while humans enjoy a robot that is a little like us, once they hit a certain level of human-ness, our feelings change.
When it comes to robots, we like the ones with some human aspects, think C3PO, but when it comes to totally lifelike ones like Bishop in Aliens, they kind of creep us out.
A study by Emory Health Sciences found that the more lifelike a robot is, the more it pushes us into the “ “the uncanny valley.” A term to describe the theory that subconsciously, when people see a robot with overtly human features, we feel like it has a mind (I take this to mean consciousness). According to this theory, the sense that a machine appears to have a mind creeps us out.
It’s more complicated than that, but the result is the same: we don’t like it.
I think it’s because people subconsciously pick up subtle cues that tell us something’s not right. Like when you meet someone who’s a total sociopath, and they give you the heebee-jeebees.
I think it’s a fundamental lack of warmth and depth of feeling that gives us our human connection, and when it’s missing, we just know.
This research is helping us understand how we perceive faces and could be valuable as we rush ever farther down the path towards A.I.
Scientists are also hoping it can help us understand the mechanisms involved in mind-blindness, a symptom of extreme autism, and certain psychotic disorders.
While projecting human qualities onto intimate objects is nothing new, think the show, “My Strange Obsession,” where they guy married his car (yes, I know that’s an extreme case, but what the hell!??) or how you might see a face in a gnarley old tree. It’s called anthropomorphization, but research suggests this is more than just that.
To try to understand this further, researchers showed participants pictures of three types of faces:
- human faces
- machine-like robot faces
- android faces similar to humans
They rated each for “aliveness.”
Through a complex process of altering and analyzing the pictures and how long people looked at them, scientists determined that humans can almost instantly distinguish a human or robot face (no surprise there). But although we initially anthropomorphize the android, we can tell somethings off within milliseconds.
We seem to have a built-in mechanism that tells us something is wrong when someone doesn’t give off the warmth we need to feel comfy.
We’re so attuned that this research suggests we can even pick it up from pictures — and quickly.
We become uncomfortable and slightly repulsed when someone doesn’t radiate humanity. That coldness sends us into “the uncanny valley.” Possibly a kind of unconscious warning that someone might not have empathy and be dangerous.
So if you were hoping you’d have better luck with robot relationships someday when the androids are lifelike, you might have to brace yourself for disappointment.
It’s not them, it’s you.
Here are some famous examples of fictional robots, see if you can find the ones that would probably creep you out:
- C3PO: Star Wars
- Rosie: The Jetsons
- Terminator: The Terminator
- Baymax: Big Hero 6
- Lance Bishop: Aliens
- Data: Star Trek Generations
- David: A.I. Artificial Intelligence
On the big or little screen, friendships and relationships with human-like androids seem possible even likely. Logic tells us that the more human a robot appears, the more likely we are to warm to it. But what science tells us is that it’s not that simple in real life because our brains have a mechanism to detect and warn us of the absence of human “warmth.”
So when you’re purchasing your robot, it might be a good idea to buy one that’s a little more robot-like and keep things professional. Because if you’re looking for a robot spouse or best friend, you might be wasting your money.
If it’s too lifelike, you might not be able to get the relationship off the ground.
Thanks for reading!
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