Is It Ever OK to Bash a Robot?
"Robot abuse" sounds pretty bad. Here's why some think it's not.
When Georgia Tech's Ayanna Howard saw a visiting schoolchild poke her robot in its eye, she wasn't having it. She told the kid robots could "come to your house in the middle of the night while you're sleeping in order to punish you --- because they'll remember how bad you were to them!" (The anecdote is in her lively and pithy new book, Sex Race and Robots, where she adds "I got a little bit of satisfaction at the look of fear that appeared on his face.")
That's pretty hard core, but most roboticists I've met would get it. It's natural to want to catch your fragile and expensive darling before it hits the hard floor, and to bristle when people don't admire it as much as you do. They can't stomach people being "mean" to their machines.
Fortunately for them, human beings empathize readily with anything that has the slightest semblance of life and feeling. Robots move on their own and seem to make decisions, so they fit that bill. (This is why people name their Roombas and have held fune…