Has COVID-19 made us nicer to machines?
Research shows that individuals affected by the COVID-19 pandemic have shown more empathy to humans and to human-like autonomous machines.
"The new discovery here is that when people are distracted by something distressing, they treat machines socially like they would treat other people. We found greater faith in technology due to the pandemic and a closing of the gap between humans and machines," said Jonathan Gratch, senior author of the study and director for virtual humans research at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.
These findings were published in the journal iScience.
"Our findings show that as people interacted more via machines during the past year, perceptions about the value of technology increased, which led to more favorable responses to machines," Gratch said.
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Source: Science Daily
