--- title: "They Asked if People Would Rather Kill a Human or a Sentient Robot" description: "A new experiment asked participants whether they'd kill a robot to save humans. The results, as with many AI questions, were complicated." date: "2019-02-09" modified: "2019-02-11" authors: - name: "Jon Christian" job_title: "Executive Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jonc" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/kill-human-sentient-robot" categories: - "Robotics" - "Robots and Machines" tags: - "ethics" - "pyschology" - "robots" - "the digest" --- # They Asked if People Would Rather Kill a Human or a Sentient Robot ![]() *\Image: Activedia/Victor Tangermann\* ## Robot Rights It's an old philosophical question: if a speeding train is careening down the track, and it's about to crush a group of injured people, would you pull a lever that would redirect it to kill just one innocent person? Now, provocative new research puts a new twist on the thought experiment by asking people whether they'd pull the lever to kill an intelligent robot and save a person. ## Trolleyology A [new paper]() in the journal *Social Cognition* describes an experiment in which participants were presented with a variety of ethical puzzles: whether to sacrifice a robot presented as a "simple machine," a robot with intelligence and other human traits, and even whether to sacrifice a regular human. "The more the robot was depicted as human — and in particular the more feelings were attributed to the machine — the less our experimental subjects were inclined to sacrifice it," said co-author Markus Paulus, a researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians University, in a [statement](). "This result indicates that our study group attributed a certain moral status to the robot." ## Virtual Persons Maybe the result was intuitive: the more strongly the robot was presented as being person-like — having its own "thoughts, experiences, pain, and emotions" — the less likely the participants were to sacrifice it in order to save human lives. To Paulus, that suggest a grim takeaway. "One possible implication of this finding is that attempts to humanize robots should not go too far," Paulus said. "Such efforts could come into conflict with their intended function — to be of help to us." **READ MORE:** [Robot on the Trolley Car Track: How Valuable is Robot Life?]() \[*Interesting Engineering*\] ***More on robot ethics:** [Saudi Arabia Made a Robot a Citizen. Now, She’s Calling For Women’s Rights.]()* ## 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]()