Why humans might want, and need, robots to be jerks.

Siri sure is polite. “People don’t like ‘yes men’ all the time,” says Rea, a professor of computer science at the University of New Brunswick and Kyoto University. “If the robot always says, ‘yes, yes, yes,’ that would sound like a slave, right?” the roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro told a virtual conference of robot designers in March. While a robot shouldn’t be a complete jerk, he said, he has found that some “weak negative behaviors” make for “much better relationships with the human.” Occasionally vexing robots might be better for people for another reason, too: When machines take over a job, their way of doing it becomes our standard. “But I created a robot that turned off the people I wanted it to stand up for.” Still, the experiment did show that robots needn’t passively change the subject if they hear a vile comment.