[VIdeo] Robots Commit Mistakes Too: This Robot Teaches Humans to Admit Insecurities and Vulnerability

Yale University has recently produced a very 'friendly' robot that helps human accepts their mistakes even when failing or losing a game. Their creation shows how robots can also commit mistakes on their system but can easily admit it-- just like how humans should be, according to the team.

This video shows how robots are not perfect just like humans

Just like how Yale University described it, the robot shows humans how to show positive reactions and admission to vulnerability and failures. Based on the video, three people and a robot will play a team game that must be accomplished by all members of the team-- once someone commits a mistake or lose the game, the whole team will also lose the game.

If the robot commits the mistake, the 'vulnerable robot' will admit that he had made an error and will say 'sorry' to all his teammates. He will also add that he felt bad for letting his team down by not completing the task he was asked to do.

According to their study led by Margaret Traeger, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the Yale Institute for Network Science, there seemed to be a major impact for the humans when the robot admitted his mistakes in front of them. This is what they found out when they conducted an experiment in which 153 people were divided into 51 groups composed of three humans and a robot.

"The robots either remained silent, uttered a neutral, task-related statement (such as the score or number of rounds completed), or expressed vulnerability through a joke, personal story, or by acknowledging a mistake; all of the robots occasionally lost a round," written by Yale.

However, the team that has the 'vulnerable robot' tend to spend twice as much time talking to each other compared to other teams. The three people that joined the game created higher communication with their teammates and also expressed their vulnerability since the robot admits his mistakes.

The study also shows that the presence of a speaking robot in a team encourages humans to speak more.

"A robot's social behavior influences the conversational dynamics between human members of the human-robot group, demonstrating the ability of a robot to significantly shape human-human interaction," said the study.

Robots must be filled with positive experiences working for people

Since social robots are now being built around the world to be used in stores and such, the team said that people should practice positive reactions towards robots to promote harmonized relationship within each other.

"We are interested in how society will change as we add forms of artificial intelligence to our midst," said Nicholas A. Christakis, Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science. "As we create hybrid social systems of humans and machines, we need to evaluate how to program the robotic agents so that they do not corrode how we treat each other."

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