People tend to cut corners and allow trusted colleagues to pick up the slack when working as a team, in a phenomenon known as social loafing. Now researchers have found that the same thing happens when humans work with robots.
at the Technical University of Berlin in Germany and her colleagues designed an experiment to test whether humans would put in less effort when they think that their personal contribution to a task won鈥檛 be noticed.
The researchers asked a group of 42 people to examine images of circuit boards for errors using a computer that tracked their work. Half of them looked at boards that had already been inspected by a robot, and half were told that they were the only ones responsible for quality control.
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People working in conjunction with the robot caught fewer defects, after they had already seen that the robot had successfully flagged lots of errors.
The researchers say such teamwork could lead to a drop in motivation if individual effort isn鈥檛 visible and warn that there could be safety implications if teams of people and robots work on safety-critical tasks in the same way.
at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, says it is fine to use robots like this, as long as they are effective, but that they should be considered tools rather than colleagues or team members.
鈥淭his anthropomorphism is getting out of hand, honestly,鈥� says Richardson. 鈥淚t鈥檚 this idea that there is a collaborative process going on that I reject. It just strikes me that workers are doing what they鈥檝e always done, which is in situations where they think a tool can do something, they let it.鈥�
She says social loafing is probably down to poor management style, in which individual work isn鈥檛 recognised or rewarded. 鈥淚 bet you if there was an incentive behind it, and if the humans could get an extra bonus for spotting [errors in] the chips, then they鈥檇 put a bit more effort into it,鈥� she says.
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
