Unfortunate Altruism

Inspired by Amini Hamuli's 'Round Table'

Competitiveness vs Selflessness

In Amini's post 'round table' she talks about the art installation Round Table by Chloe U-Ram. In this work 18 headless strawmen tilt a platform with a 'head' rolling on it, all with the goal of getting that head to themselves, but none of them is ever able to claim it cause they are all working against each other. I like how Amini interprets this installation as displaying competitiveness and it got me thinking about selfishness and how if enough of the strawmen were selfless, at least one could have a head instead of none. This made me think more about altruism, acting selfless and helping others even at a risk or cost to oneself. I also read a very interesting paper about how altruistic behavior is necessary in robots for humans to trust them (Chen et al., 2022).

Round Table by Choe U-ram at the exhibition “MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2022. https://m.koreaherald.com/article/2983560

Take It All

With the information that altruism is needed for people to trust robotic creatures I think it would be interesting to see the reaction if such a creature is a little too altruistic, displaying a sort of unfortunate altruism where it is a little all too willing to give everything away even if it is harmful to itself. Let's imagine an interactive creature that has various parts and it invites whoever interacts with it to take a part from it. If someone takes a part from it, it'll make a hurt noise even though everything about it is insistent that the user takes it and it will not take its part back. I think this interaction has a bit of resemblance to how people treat most machines that don't really encourage any sympathetic feelings towards them, we use them and take from them until they stop working. It would be interesting to see what difference it would make for people to take from a robotic creature that does clearly display the human quality of altruism and does encourage sympathy towards itself.

References
Chen, N., Zhai, Y., & Liu, X. (2022). The Effects of Robots’ Altruistic Behaviours and Reciprocity on Human-robot Trust. International Journal Of Social Robotics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-022-00899-6

Background images
Martin Péchy from Pexels. https://www.pexels.com/nl-nl/foto/teal-muurverf-304664/
Tembela Bohle from Pexels. https://www.pexels.com/nl-nl/foto/blauwe-watermassa-1029545/

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