The Digital Life

The Digital Life


Are We Too Trusting of Technology?

September 30, 2016

Jon: Welcome to Episode 175 of the Digitalife, a show about our insights into the future of design and technology. I'm your host, Jon Follett, and with me is founder and co-host, Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Greetings, listeners.

Jon: For the podcast this week, we're going to discuss the question, are we too trusting of technology? Up until now, we've had a long run of technology where we've built our trust in these various systems. Email we now use instead of mail, we don't feel particularly worried, we do a little, but not too much that our email is going to get to the person we wish it to get to. For online purchasing, we're fairly confident that using a credit card online will successful transact and we'll be able to get the goods that we want. In fact, Americans are buying more and more stuff online every day. I think we've gotten over the trust issue in a number of these online technologies. We have a host of new emerging technologies of course, that could help us to navigate a lot of life and death situations.

In particular, I want to draw attention to a interesting study that was conducted by the Georgia Institute of Technology, which placed volunteers in a fake emergency situation, of course they didn't know it was fake at the time, to see whether or not they blindly follow a robot that indicated that it could get a safe route out of the building. In the experiment, the volunteers follow a robot down the hall to a conference room where they're asked to complete some minor task. As they're sitting there completing this task in the conference room, smoke starts to billow into the room. The robot has a little sign that, "You can follow me to safety," basically, emergency robot guide, I think it said.

Dirk: Of course the people were going to follow the robot, unless they know the way out themselves, if they don't know.

Jon: I believe they knew the route in, because they walked in.

Dirk: It was pretty straightforward, it was like, "Left, right, left, right, left, right, where the hell am I?"

Jon: The robot just led them off into the ...

Dirk: Into the fire?

Jon: Yes, exactly, and of course, I think 26 of the 30 people followed the robot. A couple were disqualified, and the other 2 didn't leave the conference room. Basically, everybody who left the conference room and who was not disqualified followed this robot, which of course raises an interesting question for human-robot interaction, right? You've got this figure of authority, which is your robot, you're expected to follow it because it says it's the emergency robot guide. What are our instincts, and if they're telling us, "Hey, this is not the way I came in, why should I be following this robot out of the building when it's clearly not leading me anywhere safe?"

Dirk: I call BS on this test. I call total BS, total BS, for a bajillion reasons. Number 1, if you've smelled real fire you know what it smells like, and it smells a lot different than a smoke generator or a fog generator. Unless they were really super careful about bringing in smoke that explicitly smelled like a real fire, you're going to have people that deconstruct the activity right there. Second, people know they're coming in for an experiment, they probably signed a form, it's a normal lab thing. It's not unusual for the lab things to take a left turn, to misdirect you. Some percentage of those people could have totally deconstructed the activity, and kind of called bullshit, like, "Oh, okay, here we go." 3, we've been conditioned that emergency exits are different places. If you're in a hotel for example, the emergency exits are these weird things way the hell off in the corner.

It's not the way you came in. We're taught that in the environments we go to that are outside of our homes, we're taught emergency exit is a special place and it's not the normal place. I think there's a million reasons why people would follow the robot or not go out of the room, or disqualify.