Robots in the Workplace? Humans Don't Mind

In a constantly evolving technological society, you might think that humans could feel a bit threatened, devalued or annoyed by robots in the workplace.

Researchers at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) set out to see what average employees thought. Were they belittled by this idea? Nope.

"In our research we were seeking to find that sweet spot for ensuring that the human workforce is both satisfied and productive," said lead study author Matthew Gombolay, a CSAIL PhD student, in a news release. "We discovered that the answer is to actually give machines more autonomy, if it helps people to work together more fluently with robot teammates."

For the study, researchers composed groups of two human workers and one robot worker who was exposed to three working conditions. The first condition was manual, where all tasks were assigned by a human. The second condition was fully autonomous, with all tasks assigned by the robot. The third condition was semi-autonomous, where one human assigned tasks to himself while the robot assigned tasks to different humans.

Findings showed that the group with the most efficiency that was also the most preferred by human workers was the fully antonomous choice. Furthermore, some of the human workers even said that the robot understood them and "improved the efficiency of the team," according to Science Recorder.

"Instead of coming up with a plan by hand, it's about developing tools to help create plans automatically," Gombolay added.

Future research on the idea will be continued as part of an extensive line of recent advances that actually allow robots to interact more directly with humans.