Don't be fooled by charismatic robots

The robots aren’t coming — they’re already here, and have been for quite some time. In pop culture, sci-fi classics like “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” featured fictional robots prominently, along with “The Twilight Zone,” “The Jetsons,” and many comic books. The bridge between Shakey and Sophia is peppered with robots both real and imagined, from R2-D2 and C3PO — two of the best Sophia’s processing and interactive facilities are fueled by small and powerful virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa that accumulate the tools for future machine learning by dealing with millions of customers daily. Instead, the Terminator-like scripts in which powerful male-bodied robots turn on their creators are set aside to make space for shows like “Humans” and “Black Mirror,” in which human characters are not only more confused about the line between human/cyborg/machine, but also about the relative value of people when compared with their similar machine counterparts. In the October 2019 Grinnell College National Poll, 18 percent of the more than 1,000 participants responded “frequently” to the statement “I find my smartphone enjoyable and even charming”, while another 28 percent responded “occasionally.” These relational responses relocate the nexus of exchange between human and machine from the physical to the interactional and social.