In Emergencies, Should You Trust a Robot?

In emergencies, people may trust robots too much for their own safety, a new study suggests. In a mock building fire, test subjects followed instructions from an “Emergency Guide Robot” even after the machine had proven itself unreliable – and after some participants were told that robot had broken down.

People seem to believe that these robotic systems know more about the world than they really do, and that they would never make mistakes or have any kind of fault,
Alan Wagner, a senior research engineer in the Georgia Tech Research Institute