--- title: "People Are Brutally Assaulting Robots. Experts Want to Know Why" description: "People across the world are brutally assaulting robots — a trend that could indicate a deep compulsion to lash out against automatons." date: "2019-01-20" modified: "2019-01-20" authors: - name: "Jon Christian" job_title: "Executive Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jonc" url: "https://futurism.com/brutally-assaulting-robots" categories: - "Robotics" - "Robots and Machines" tags: - "frankenstein" - "Psychology" - "robots" - "violence" --- # People Are Brutally Assaulting Robots. Experts Want to Know Why ![People across the world are brutally assaulting robots — a trend that could indicate a deep compulsion to lash out against automatons.]() *\Image: Terminator 2/TriStar\* ## Killing Robots Remember when assailants [beat and dismembered]() a hitchhiking robot? Or [destroyed a sex robot]() at an electronics show? Or when a man [pulled a gun]() on a Waymo self-driving car? Or [beat an educational robot]() with a baseball bat? Those incidents aren't outliers, experts say. Again and again, people across the world are attacking and injuring robots — a trend, [according to the *New York Times*](), that could indicate a deep compulsion to lash out against automatons, and which could have wide-ranging implications for the future of interactions between robots and humans. ## Rage Against the Machine One hypothesis is that the violence is due to economic anxiety: people are worried that robots could [take their jobs](). That's one plausible solution, according to the *Times*, but another could be the ancient and brutal human tendency to exclude tribal outsiders. "You have an agent, the robot, that is in a different category than humans," Italian cognitive psychologist Agnieszka Wykowska told the paper. “So you probably very easily engage in this psychological mechanism of social ostracism because it’s an out-group member. That’s something to discuss: the dehumanization of robots even though they’re not humans." ## Frankenstein Syndrome Wykowska blames anti-robot violence on what she calls "Frankenstein syndrome" — the fear of unknown things that are somewhat like us, but different in uncanny ways. Wykowska told the *Times* about an incident, for instance, in which a colleague introduced robots to a kindergarten class. The children "have this tendency of being very brutal to the robot, they would kick the robot, they would be cruel to it, they would be really not nice,” she said. But there was a bright side, she told the paper. When the teachers told the children that the robots had names — humanizing them, perhaps, in a small way — the violence stopped. **READ MORE:** [Why Do We Hurt Robots?]() \[*The New York Times*\] ***More on anti-robot violence:** [People Are Reportedly Attacking Driverless Cars in California]()* ## Author I'm responsible for editing, assigning, and scouting at Futurism, as well as occasionally writing for the site. That work involves keeping an eye on a wide range of narratives and issues, but over the past few years I've become increasingly interested in how AI is shaping the future of media, the web, and information itself. My day-to-day often involves collaborating on reporting and commentary projects bylined by my colleagues, but I try to find time to do my own reporting as well; stories I've broken for Futurism have been cited by publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica, New York Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Bloomberg, and more. I grew up in Southern Vermont and attended Vanderbilt University. Prior to Futurism, I contributed to outlets including the Boston Globe, Vice, Wired, Slate, the Atlantic, the Outline, Ars Technica and more, and did stints in farming and food service. I currently live in Brooklyn, New York, and in my free time I enjoy pinball, word games, cycling, running, and music production. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()