/r/technology thread about the Chinese Moon Rover
Why do we feel so much empathy for what we know are 'dumb' machines?
Why do we anthropomorphize them so easily?
Why is that one XKCD so damn sad?
Four books on this: The Second Self (1985) Alone Together (2011) Love and Sex with Robots (2008) You are Not A Gadget (2011) I've read two and a half of those. Here's the short answer: We have evolved to communicate as equals. If the communication is imperfect, we "fill in the gaps" with our own experience so that we continue to communicate as equals. This is why we have pets. Once we have affinity for an animal, we anthropomorphize our experience with pets by assigning them motives, beliefs and behaviors out of our own psyche. With animals, there is the same basic risk/reward/response framework, particularly as we favor mammals as pets. Things go wrong with gadgets because there is no risk/reward/response framework. When a human is presented with the scant responses of a machine, the human works overtime to assign human overtones to the machine in order to relate in a comfortable, familiar way. It fucks us up. I wholeheartedly recommend Alone Together. Just read this much and see if you agree.
As to the xkcd - It presumes that not only is the Mars rover human, but that it has the same wants and needs as we do. Also, that it wants to come home, but can't. It works because loneliness is universal and there's very few places lonelier than Mars. It's a lie, though. Consider the mars rover as a creature. It was born to go to mars, bred to go to mars, trained to go to mars, and the hopes and dreams of millions bouyed it on its way to mars. Through fire and drama it lands on mars and makes astonishing discovery after astonishing discovery. It continues its discoveries and its journeys through one lifetime, two, three. Ten. Twenty. Opportunity is the Methuselah of Mars, continuing to send back insight and wonder through forty lifetimes. That fucker ain't sad, he exultant.
It is human nature to anthropomorphise. We do it always. I suspect it arises from our ability to do mental modeling - we create, and identify with, mental models of other humans, in order to read their minds, to know what they are thinking and feeling. We just don't know how to turn it off.
My opinion: Because they are extensions of ourselves. They are essential parts of us. We are cyborgs. Similar reasons. We imbue them with super-human abilities. We can't see to the edge of the universe, so we invent Hubble. We can't live on Mars, so we invent Curiosity. Because there is a sensing extension of the human collective trapped on another planet.Why do we feel so much empathy for what we know are 'dumb' machines?
Why do we anthropomorphize them so easily?
Why is that one XKCD so damn sad?
I had a professor at university, intro to Computer Science class. I believe he understood this drive humans have to anthropomorphise, because he gave me some of the best advice I ever had regarding the craft. All beginning programmers will have an aversion to have their code criticised - we feel that our programs are extensions of ourselves, and feel attacked when they are attacked. This professor advised us to think of our programs not as extensions of ourselves, but as our children - independents, who may well go on and have lives of their own beyond our control.
A criticism of our program can then become seen an effort to strengthen our child, not to attack our self. He re-directed our natural desire to anthropomorphise to a more productive direction.
Yes, exactly - he didn't try to stop us from anthropomorphising, he encouraged us to look at it in a different way. The idea was to encourage constructive criticism, and to get us used to letting peers see (and judge) our "babies".
One of my favorite explanations for why we might anthropomorphize inanimate tools (as well as high utility animals, and other things) and begin to feel empathy for them is that perhaps it allowed us to highly emotionally value them as rare, important objects which would naturally trigger the sort of behavior (continual investment of time and resources) that would keep them functioning and useful. If you see your corgi like a nephew or your woodworking tools like a vaguely adulterous relationship, you take care of them better, spend more time with/on them, increasing their future usefulness to you. This way of thinking may have especially been useful in previous times when everything wasn't so disposable/replaceable.