The sermonator
“IF PEOPLE no longer easily trust their human priests, and there is less of religious community life, could they trust a robot priest?” Stanford University’s Cindy Mason discussed the case for a mechanical minister at a recent conference on ethics and AI held in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Noting that revelations around sexual abuse in the Catholic church had diminished trust in priests, Mason explored the role that costumes had on shaping public reactions to robots.
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A robot fashion show at a Nordstrom department store in 2015 demonstrated that the same robot dressed in different outfits – bride, superhero, “frilly girrly” and others – elicited different reactions, and people were more likely to ask about the robot’s role than its hardware or software.
It’s not clear to us whether robot priests would be rehabilitating the image of robots or priests, but we note that as well as a stint as a shopping assistant, the Pepper android built by Softbank Robotics has also turned its hand to ministering Buddhist funerals.
“French media reports that annual sales of Nutella weigh in at “almost as much as the Empire State building”. Lynn Holman asks “Why can’t they use elephants like everyone else?””
In 2011, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council published guidelines about ethical robots, the fourth of which states that machines “should not be designed to exploit vulnerable users by evoking an emotional response or dependency”.
Mason recommends an addendum: that robots should be designed so that their appearance matches their function. In other words, clothes maketh the man – and the machine.
The right stuff
GOOD-looking people are more likely to identify as politically right wing, according to a recent study published by the Journal of Public Economics. Rolfe Peterson and Carl Palmer looked at two historical data sets that include information about political beliefs and looks. For one, interviewers were instructed to rate the respondents “from 1 (homely) to 5 (strikingly handsome or beautiful)”.
The results show that more attractive people tended to gravitate toward conservative political opinions. It’s well demonstrated that more attractive people are treated more favourably in society, and the authors hypothesise that this leads them to have difficulty in appreciating .
In the same journal, Niclas Berggren and his colleagues note that this also applies to politicians. , the pattern appears so ingrained that, in the absence of other information, voters will assume that the attractive candidate is the conservative one. Finally, a scientific discovery that narcissistic despots can cheer about.
Vroom and gloom
READER Derek Woodroffe is left i the dark by roadworks on the A52 going in to Derby. He says there is a sign there telling drivers that due to the roadworks, the street lighting isn’t working.
“Although it was daytime, so I probably didn’t need the lighting, it did occur to me that each of the lamps has a large bright indicator showing that the light is working,” says Derek. The lack of light from the lamps at night would probably tell me that they were out of service, he says, “so the sign feels rather redundant”.
He notes the sign itself wasn’t illuminated, “although I’m not sure if that would make the sign more or less useful”.
Dust off the candles
A PERFECTLY aged Howard Bobry writes: “I must respectfully disagree with both Feedback and reader Colin Jacobson regarding the ageing effects of birthdays” (20 January).
He says that as someone born on 29 February, “I can assure you that my having had only 17 birthdays has not limited my ageing, nor has this paucity hastened my demise (yet)”.
Love’s labour lost
THE Guardian reports the death of Nigel, a male gannet that spent five years alone on Mana Island in New Zealand, trying to court decoys placed there by conservationists. The 80 concrete replicas, painted to look like gannets and accompanied by solar-powered speakers playing their calls, were installed in the hopes of encouraging the birds to start a colony. However, when three real birds arrived recently, Nigel chose to ignore them, preferring the company of his stony companions, and died soon after.
Peer review
SCIENTISTS are reviewing everyday items that prove useful for research, using the hashtag on Twitter. The trend was inspired by an Amazon review for tea strainers left by “John”, who noted that the spherical mesh cage was perfect for holding ants.
We find a 10-speed battery-operated body massaging wand is just right for luring spiders out of their dens. And another entomologist waxes lyrical about Keebler Pecan Sandies Cookies: “You will not find a more convenient and attractive field bait for myrmicine ants. No mess, no fuss, and the light color allows easy following of foraging worker ants back to their nest.”
Clear nail polish proves useful both for “sealing coverslips onto freshly stained slices of brain” and essential first aid for jungle fieldwork, where you can use it to seal botfly wounds in the skin to prevent the maggot beneath developing. Who said science wasn’t glamorous?
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