Mercy For Robots?

In 2007, Christoph Bartneck, a robotics professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, decided to stage an experiment loosely based on the famous (and infamous) Milgram obedience study. In Milgram's study, research subjects were asked to administer increasingly powerful electrical shocks to a person pretending to be a volunteer "learner" in another room. The researcher subject would ask a question, and whenever the learner made a mistake, the research subject was supposed to administer a shock — each shock slightly worse than the one before. As the experiment went on, and as the shocks increased in intensity, the "learners" began to clearly suffer. They would scream and beg for the research subject to stop while a "scientist" in a white lab coat instructed the research subject to continue, and in videos of the experiment you can see some of the research subjects struggle with how to behave. The research subjects wanted to finish the experiment like they were told. But how exactly to respond to these terrible cries for mercy? Bartneck studies human/robot relations, and he wanted to know what would happen if a robot in a similar position to the "learner" begged for its life. Would there be any moral pause? Or would research subjects simply extinguish the life of a machine pleading for its life without any thought or remorse?

 via NPR /continue reading