Visitors staying at Starwood\u2019s Aloft Hotel in Cupertino, California, not only have the luxury of humans greeting them and toting around their luggage. They also may be taken care of by a robot bellhop, named Botlr, who is mainly charged with delivering toiletries to guests\u2019 rooms and eliciting smiles along the way.<\/p>\n
Of course, by referring to a robot as \u201cwho,\u201d I\u2019m already starting to blur the line between humans and machines, something Brian McGuiness, Aloft\u2019s global brand leader, was keen to address in a recent interview with my colleague<\/a>. \u201cThis isn\u2019t going to replace associates or our talent,\u201d he said. \u201cFor us, it was really just to augment the team that\u2019s there.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite assurances like these, there\u2019s palpable nervousness among us workers about whether or not robots and algorithms will eventually take our jobs (including yours truly<\/a>, but I\u2019m generally nervous about everything). This is evidenced, and perhaps brought on by, the number of news reports about hot new bots, a depressed job market still inching out of a global recession, and a much-discussed \u201cskills gap\u201d<\/a> when it comes to STEM fields. (The Upshot\u2019s Claire Cain Miller does a nice job of putting all of these trends into context<\/a>.) Even experts are pretty divided about whether or not robots will take our jobs<\/a>.<\/p>\n The \u201cenormous doom and gloom\u201d about \u201cbotsourcing,\u201d as Harvard Business School\u2019s Michael Norton puts it, is part of the reason he and Kellogg School of Management\u2019s Adam Waytz set out to study the emotions surrounding the question of robots in our workforce. \u201cMuch like the debate over outsourcing \u2014 when jobs previously performed in one country are outsourced to workers in another country \u2014\u00a0we found that people had strong emotional reactions to the notion that robots were poised to \u2018take over.’\u201d<\/p>\n In a series of experiments<\/a>, Norton and Waytz tested exactly how these emotions work, and particularly whether the type of work being performed \u2014 described as either \u201cthinking\u201d or \u201cfeeling\u201d jobs \u2014 changed how a person felt about a robot taking their job.<\/p>\n The researchers turned to members of Amazon\u2019s Mechanical Turk, the online task marketplace, to help answer these questions. Because jobs posted on the platform can vary from \u201cevaluating advertising materials to generating a list of Bach compositions,\u201d there\u2019s a built-in range when it comes to emotional and cognitive tasks. The researchers then bolstered this range by presenting tasks to users as either \u201crequiring the capacity for thinking and the ability to be rational\u201d or requiring \u201cthe capacity for feeling and the ability to be emotional.\u201d They then asked how comfortable they would be with a robot taking a task in general, and then specifically about taking a task they were originally supposed to perform.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were surprised by how consistent our results were,\u201d reports Norton. \u201cAgain and again, we saw that while people were somewhat comfortable with robots performing \u2018thinking\u2019 types of jobs (like accounting), they became much more opposed when we asked them about robots performing \u2018feeling\u2019 jobs (like elementary school teachers).\u201d<\/p>\n But in a twist, they also found that some simple reframing can alter emotional reactions. \u201cPeople\u2019s views were somewhat flexible,\u201d says Norton. \u201cWe found that people were less opposed to botsourcing of teaching jobs when we described the same job as requiring more thinking skills (numbers) than feeling skills (the mentoring.\u201d<\/p>\n This is something businesses should keep in mind. While their research certainly doesn\u2019t indicate that people are wildly excited about robots in the workplace, \u201ccompanies considering botsourcing are wise to \u2014 if possible \u2014 limit the practice to jobs that people deem suitable for robots: those that do not require emotional intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n Norton and Waytz\u2019s work augments the growing scholarship about what it means as robots become part of our workforce, be it in manufacturing or traditional knowledge work. We know, for instance, that how we design robots matters when it comes to emotion; in one case from Carnegie Mellon University<\/a>, researchers found that people anthropomorphized a treat-delivering robot aptly named \u201cSnackbot,\u201d building levels of trust and rapport. Snackbot\u2019s presence also changed how people related to one another, changing the organizational dynamic.<\/p>\n In another example<\/a>, a researcher found that people rated robots with male names higher than robots with female ones if the robot was performing security work. Gender bias, it seems, is alive and well with artificial intelligence, too.<\/p>\n What all of this boils down to is the fact that the robots-and-jobs question isn\u2019t merely an economic or macro-societal one<\/a>; it\u2019s also a fairly complicated management issue. And while groups like The Future of Life Institute are laying the groundwork for the ethical creation and use of robots<\/a>, it seems like similar considerations should be considered when it comes to robots at work. The ethical management of robots, in other words, and how robots will ethically manage us.<\/p>\n After all, as Norton and Waytz point out at the end of their research, humans are remarkably prone to becoming emotionally attached to AI. In the 1960s, MIT\u2019s Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a computer program capable of conversing with humans via a chat mechanism. It mimicked Rogerian psychotheraphy \u2014 think answers like \u201cWho else in your family hates you?\u201d when you complain that your mom hates you.<\/p>\n Weizenbaum, who died in 2008, was said to have been \u201cstunned to discover that his students and others became deeply engrossed in conversations with the program, occasionally revealing intimate personal details,\u201d according to an obituary written in The New York Times<\/em><\/a>. Their attachment to ELIZA didn\u2019t change much, when they were clued into the fact that they weren\u2019t talking to an actual person.<\/p>\n In the end, the programmer became a critic of artificial intelligence. But the blurring of what the human mind can only do \u2014 \u00a0and what we\u2019ll accept as its alternative \u2014 hasn\u2019t gone away. As Norton tells it, reflecting on ELIZA\u2019s legacy, \u201ceven for jobs that people typically believe require human emotional intelligence, research may still uncover ways in which even the most emotional jobs might be botsourced.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Visitors staying at Starwood\u2019s Aloft Hotel in Cupertino, California, not only have the luxury of humans greeting them and toting around their luggage. They also may be taken care of by a robot bellhop, named Botlr, who is mainly charged with delivering toiletries to guests\u2019 rooms and eliciting smiles along the way. Of course, by\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web-fragments"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":255,"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions\/255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}