The Robot Manners Conundrum

**Brian** (0:01)
Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to another Saturday Conundrum. I'm your host, Brian. I'm one of the co-hosts of The Daily AI Show. And while every Monday through Friday, we bring you a live, roughly one hour show on Saturdays, I'd like to bring you the conundrums. So what are we talking about this week? Well, we're talking about robot manners. Specifically, what we're talking about in this episode is as humanoid robots become more ever-present in our lives outside of the factories, day-to-day type stuff, drive-through windows, these kinds of things.
How does the concept of manners apply?
And so it's interesting. I think this is something that's going to hit us, hit the society much faster than we think. I mean, sometimes you already see stuff like this over in China, but it's going to eventually be everywhere. And you know, when you think about it, there's so many companies right now. On the show alone, we talk about, oh, I don't know, Tesla's got the Optimus robot, you've got Digit from Agility, you've got all the stuff, both Boston Robotics has been doing for a while. The Figure robot, right? You've got the really cool one, Neo, which is from One X Technologies. Aptronic has Apollo. Then you got the Chinese ones like Unitree, that's been building robots forever, as well as AjiBot and just so many more. Those are the ones just off the top of my head.
It's going to be something we all deal with. And what I mean by deal with is they're going to be giving you, this humanoid robot is going to be giving you your McDonald's order through the drive-through window, or maybe it's going to be at Starbucks. I'm not saying tomorrow, but eventually, eventually this will be the case. And then it comes to the idea of, yes, this is a machine. Yes, it can be programmed to emote and look human-like, and maybe even say, oh, I have feelings or something, which is really crazy. But what it really comes down to is, should we have manners towards robots like we do humans? And that's really where the conundrum comes in, because there's definitely two sides of this. One is, no, it's a robot. It's not a human.
It does not need or should get human empathy, or other types of emotions that you would towards another human. The other side says, what you see is what you learn, and do we really want a society where a bunch of people are being really rude or otherwise to humanoid robots, and that becomes something that children or others learn from and decide that perhaps it's okay to act that way around other humans, and that they can't make the distinction, especially as these humanoid robots become more and more human-like. Not necessarily maybe in their look, although that could happen, where they have natural-looking skin or maybe the face looks real. But just the fact that they respond as a human would, that they are programmed to laugh or compliment you or whatever it might be, it's just in our human nature to say please and thank you. Let's get into it. What's the intro here and then the conundrum? This is the robot manners conundrum. Humanoid robots are starting to move from labs into workspaces, schools, stores, and homes. I would say starting but maybe still a couple years away before we're all interacting with them. But anyway, as it becomes more common, we'll have to decide how people are expected to behave around them. Do you say please and thank you to a robot? Do you correct the child who constantly insults one? If someone screams at a humanoid machine in public, does it matter if the robot cannot feel humiliated? The robot may not care, but human manners are partly habits and habits formed around machines may carry over into how we treat people.
One view is that we should extend basic courtesy to humanoid robots because the behavior shapes us, the people watching us, and the social norms children learn. The other is that courtesy should remain tied to beings capable of experiencing respect or cruelty. Treating machines as though they deserve manners could blur an important line between people and products.
As humanoid robots become part of everyday life, should society expect us to treat them with basic human courtesy, even though they cannot feel it? Or should we preserve a clear social distinction between respecting a person and operating a machine? So I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. I'm going to pass it over to our two AI co-hosts, as we always do each conundrum. So yes, the rest of this is going to be AI generated, but that's always been the idea. But they make a compelling argument or they're talking about a compelling argument. And basically for anybody who's never listened to one of his conundrum episodes, I come up with the idea, I do the research, I use the complexity deep research to giving really good citations and good cited sources for both sides of the conundrum. That's fed into Google Notebook LM, which is now just called Notebook or Gemini Notebook, I think. It's not LM anymore.