SEATTLE – Last year, when Steven Spielberg released his technological version of Pinocchio, AI, the question he posed was whether a robot could ever truly learn to love. Now, husband-and-wife researchers at the University of Washington wonder whether young children will learn to love a robotic dog and what effect it will have on society if they do. At a press demonstration on the Washington campus on Wednesday, a group of children ages 3 to 5 played with a Sony Aibo robot dog and a fluffy black lab puppy while answering questions about how they viewed the two. Ann Foreman, a senior in the School of Information, asked the children if they thought the toys were alive, if they would be hurt if she dropped them on the ground, and what they would do if “Aibo” or “Shanti” broke.
The children agreed that neither the metal dog nor the stuffed dog could feel pain because they were toys. All but one of the children said Aibo was not alive. (One girl said it was “because it moves.”) Their suggestions for what to do with a broken Aibo were to throw it away or recycle its parts. At the same time, they said that Aibo did have a stomach, and they hugged and stroked him carefully, as if he were a real dog.
“One of the ways that children learn to be responsible for others, that their actions can affect others, that there can be negative consequences, is through their interactions with animals,” said Batya Friedman, associate professor at the University of Washington School of Information. “As they develop those senses, they carry them over into their interactions with other people.”
There are already programs for cars that can chat to keep the driver awake, and similar devices are on the way for everything from thermostats to toasters. No one expects people to start mistaking their refrigerators for friends.
Friedman said he’s not worried that a visit to a robotic dog, like the Sony Aibo, would be harmful. But he worries that if parents decide to replace robots with robots, children will miss out on the lessons they learn from having to care for something that needs to be fed and cared for to keep it alive and healthy.
Friedman and her husband Peter Kahn, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, are examining how preschoolers perceive robot dogs as part of a larger study with a Purdue University research team looking at how people respond to a variety of simulated versions of reality.
