Do humans share feelings with robots? A new study suggests they do.
Human empathy may extend further than we thought. In fact, humans may even have the ability to empathize with manufactured machines.
Researchers at Toyohashi University of Technology in collaboration with Kyoto University, released a study Tuesday revealing that when shown images of human and humanoid robotic hands in painful situations, humans responded with similar immediate levels of empathy, as evidenced by recorded electrical activity of the brain.
“I think a future society including humans and robots should be good if humans and robots are prosocial,” study co-author Michiteru Kitazaki told Inverse. “Empathy with robots as well as other humans may facilitate prosocial behaviors. Robots that help us or interact with us should be empathized by humans.”
However, humans did still respond with stronger levels of extended empathy towards humans than robots.
This could be “caused by humans' inability in taking a robot's perspective,” the researchers say. “It is reasonable that we cannot take the perspective of robots because their body and mind (if it exists) are very different from ours.”
While these results represent the first neurophysiological evidence that humans are able to identify with the perceived pain of robots, studies of human-robot empathy are not entirely new.
In 2013, two studies were conducted by German researchers from the University of Duisburg-Essen measuring human empathy levels for robots by varying methods.
The first study measured skin conductance levels of volunteers while watching videos of a dinosaur robot being treated affectionately or abusively.
“When a person is experiencing strong emotions, they sweat more, increasing skin conductance,” explains Live Science. “The volunteers reported feeling more negative emotions while watching the robot being abused. Meanwhile, the volunteers' skin conductance levels increased, showing they were more distressed.”
In the second study, researchers visualized volunteers’ brain activity while volunteers watched subsequent videos of a human and then a robot being strangled by a plastic bag. Lead study author Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten concluded, "in general, the robot stimuli elicit the same emotional processing as the human stimuli."
As robots are further introduced into human life, it becomes increasingly important to understand human-robot interaction, a phenomena that may be related to the humanoid nature of robots.
Over 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori developed the "uncanny valley" theory which suggested a “person's response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance.” This “descent into eeriness” is what he called the uncanny valley.
Mr. Mori’s theory may be disproved in the near future as researchers continue to work towards the development of human-friendly robots that humans can identify with. But while this advance in artificial intelligence suggests human potential to empathize with robots, it’s unfair to assume that robots have the ability to empathize with humans just yet.
“True empathy assumes a significant overlap in experience between the subject of the empathy and the empathizer,” says Skye McDonald, writer for Phys.org. “We are still a long way from fully understanding the complexities of how human empathy operates, so are still far from being able to simulate it in the machines we live with.”
