Collaboration with Robots Makes People Inattentive, Lazy, and Socially Inactive

Robots are now commonly used as team partners to assist humans in a wide range of workplace tasks, which often positively impacts work efficiency and results. However, little is known about how this collaboration affects humans. Researchers addressed this issue in an experiment, as reported by Frontiersin.

Experiment participants worked on a task involving the inspection of industrial defects, requiring them to search for manufacturing defects on printed circuit boards. The first group of participants worked on the task independently, while the second group worked with a robot team partner, receiving pre-verified results from the robot.

Both groups of participants later reviewed all results, took their time, and assessed their subjective efforts as high. However, participants collaborating with robots identified an average of 3.3 defects, while those working alone found significantly more defects in the given five cases, averaging 4.2. This suggests that participants paid less attention while searching for defects when working with robot team partners.

It appeared as though they conserved physical capabilities for defect searching, but the search was conducted with less mental effort and reduced attention to the gathered information. While changes in cognitive efforts were more challenging to measure, they need to be minimized for optimal productivity. Thus, the typical productivity-reducing effects that occur in human teams also manifest in human-robot teams.

Essentially, this can lead to social inactivity, defined as a reduction in individual efforts on tasks performed in teams compared to tasks performed individually, whether in teams of humans or with robots. This means that the expected improvement in results through excessive quality control with robots may not materialize at all.

It was previously reported that NASA is testing the humanoid robot Valkyrie for use on the Moon. In the summer, the United Nations presented humanoid robots at an international conference in Switzerland, including well-known models equipped with caregiving skills. For example, the social robot 'Nadine' is capable of simulating emotions and remembering information about people. According to developers, these robots are already successfully employed in assisting elderly residents in private homes.