An interesting paper from the 3rd International Conference on Human Robot Interaction investigating people's attitudes toward robot workers to identify the characteristics of occupations for which robots are qualified and desired. I really like the motivation of this paper; the authors say “the opinions of everyday people … are critical to the field of human-robot interactions because popular sentiment shapes technology adoption and because technologies are more usable if they take people's expectations into account”. Although this paper doesn't directly address accessibility, it does raise some interesting issues. Beyond dirty, dangerous and dull: what everyday people think robots should do We present a study of people's attitudes toward robot workers, identifying the characteristics of occupations for which people believe robots are qualified and desired. We deployed a web-based public-opinion survey that asked respondents (n=250) about their attitudes regarding robots' suitability for a variety of jobs (n=812) from the U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET occupational information database. We found that public opinion favors robots for jobs that require memorization, keen perceptual abilities, and service-orientation. People are preferred for occupations that require artistry, evaluation, judgment and diplomacy. In addition, we found that people will feel more positively toward robots doing jobs with people rather than in place of people. Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1349822.1349827 Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Human robot interaction, Netherlands, March 12-15 2008.

Labels: human-robot interaction, survey