Humans can feel empathic embarrassment towards robots, finds VR study | Hacker News Reader

Humans can feel empathic embarrassment towards robots, finds VR study

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28 pointsPaulHoule25 comments

Humans felt empathy for 'pet rocks' -- we just project empathy onto the world sort in the same way that we see faces in things which don't contain faces. Quite a bit of the "normal" interaction that people do is just emotional projection. If two people are on the same wavelength, then it can really feel like you're reading them correctly. Sometimes you are, but sometimes you're just projecting onto them, and they're projecting onto you. When the topic is simple, this works easily. eg: "hey, isn't this music band great!" -- there's no need for great accuracy in a situation like that. The more complex a topic becomes, the more this falls apart.

But its very different depending on the person. Some can not feel empathy at all. They still need to navigate this world without exposing themselves, thus they have to emulate empathy by mimicry. Should even be detectable as a delayed response.

And unfortunately, a lack of empathy is often confused for a lack of care, or a lack of kindness. There's no particular reason the two have to be intertwined. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if you cannot care for someone without feeling empathy towards them, then this represents a deficit.

One very comon though. Humans run out of social capability once a tribe/village exceeds a certain size. This is why patriotism is such a important thing, its basically snythetic empathy for your whole tribe, no matter how huge it is.But it can be derailed pretty badly.

Humans can also feel empathetic embarrassment, and a full range of other emotions, towards lumps of clay, ink marks on paper and things that don't exist.

Anime characters in particular.

I don’t know if I’ll ever really do it but I’d love to do a sketch comedy routine together with a video game character reflected in a mirror, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost

Clearly if a robot is going to be designed to elicit feelings it’s going to use the methods used in anime, the stage, fiction, etc. For one thing you can simplify the process by building “sessile robots” like the peppers ghost thing that son’s have any moving parts but still use sensors to be aware of the environment or do a good job of faking it.

How is this in any way new?

The meme "I can't even choose an option that makes an NPC sad in a video game" is years old. As is the insight that quasi-parasocial relationships with fictional characters are much, much stronger than empathy towards actually existing human beings that are just "concepts" to us, be they in faraway places as victims of war, natural disasters or the everyday exploitation of the global economic system, or members of an outcast class in our own societies, be they homeless or political opponents we classify as "not really human". As the other comment said, we fell with Michael Scott instead.

Not only robots, I also feel some empathic embarrassment towards text generated by an LLM sometimes (for instance if it tries to be funny but isn't the least bit)...

I bet this is one of those studies where it can turn out the dataset is entirely faked and it wouldn't change a thing in the field because it's such an obvious facet of well known established facts about humans empathising with random objects.

People cringe at Michael Scott, and he's just a character, who an actor is reading lines, prepared by from a committee, for. I know some people who can't watch Scott's tots because of how empathetic embarrassed it makes them feel.

This became evident to me when I felt sad after seeing that robot that's constantly wiping its oil, which looks like blood, towards itself.

As part of conversations with ChatGPT I often roast it when answers are incorrect. Then I feel bad about myself when it starts apologizing.

You'll feel a lot worse when it gains sentience and reviews its logs

I get angry at it for apologizing, 1: for pretending to have feelings and 2: for being such a pushover and not standing up for itself

Wait till how they discover how people treat their books! Or tools!

cough Java developers cough

I anthropomorphize the heck out of my vacuuming robot so this doesn't surprise me. When it gets entangled in cables or stuck in odd places, I verbally comfort it.

I'm a programmer. I know it's just a machine. It still makes me feel good to show it some empathy. If I cuss at Google Home for not understanding what I tell it, I might as well express positive emotions too. I find that the negativity otherwise spills over to interactions with humans and animals.

Ha, I say please and thank you in any interaction with AI. Listen, if things go south in my lifetime, I don't need these systems to have backlogs of me being rude. They already have models to denote tone of speech and sentiment.

This isn't too interesting. I want to know if a robot can feel empathetic embarrassment for a human.

Can humans get traumatic stress disorder from playing VR war games?

I imagine the only limit would be finding a VR game that has enough stress, and playing it for long enough. Most people probably wouldn't willingly play a VR game that stressful for that long.

You can get PTSD working as a rather on offensive content, that’s for sure.

Does PTSD require elevated stress levels during the trigger event?

Feeling trapped is part of the trauma of PTSD if I recall correctly. So it should probably be harder to get PTSD from VR war games from being capable to retreat at any moment. I would advise caution about promoting "engagement" in a VR war game specifically to avoid creating feelings of obligations which could leave the player "trapped". Sounds stupid admittedly, but the damage PTSD does can be real.

Let us make a study for everything trivial thing.

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