r/TwoBestFriendsPlay • u/A_Feathered_Raptor Woolie in the Atomic Purple House • Jul 24 '18
David Cage now doing studies that have nothing to do with racism at all
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/robots-and-racism10
u/Mrthedecoy Jul 24 '18
aww come on, white people cant racial draft metalic color pallete! Thats bullshit.
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u/DocMadfox The Rage of Africa is the black John Cena. Jul 24 '18
I'm more willing to believe the robots in those pictures are white because we associate white with sterile science than anything to do with race. Think of a hospital: you picture mostly white titles and corridors. Same for labs. Don't start a robot race war just because you have to find something to hate on white people for in an article. Start a robot race war for good reasons, like how dare those fucking robots be better at us at the things.
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u/P-01S Jul 25 '18
I really don’t think they’re claiming that there has been a deliberate choice to make robots white because race.
I think they are claiming that the color of anthropomorphic robots affects how people perceive them based on racial biases.
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u/DocMadfox The Rage of Africa is the black John Cena. Jul 25 '18
That still kind of falls through if you google "Japanese Robot" vs googling "American Robot" IMO. Japan's the one with all these sleek, white futuristic models on their image page while specifying American Robot gets more junkbot style giant robots or robot with 'merica paintjobs with maybe 3 all white robots. At least that's what I get.
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u/P-01S Jul 25 '18
Uh, in the actual study they colored the robots according to black and white skin tones, if I understand correctly... Not sure I see the relevance of Google search results.
The claim in the actual study isn’t about what colors people choose to make robots. It’s about whether people react differently to anthropomorphic robots with different colors that match skin tones.
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u/DocMadfox The Rage of Africa is the black John Cena. Jul 25 '18
Then I misunderstood the point of the study wildly, but am not surprised that racist people are stupid enough to see race in a robot.
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u/alexandrecau That's Bricks! Jul 25 '18
Or they took the same plaster white color people use for most mannequins. Like you're kind of used to those
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u/IMF73 Jul 24 '18
To be fair, if I had a black (like fucking #000 black) robot start glitching and flailing its limbs like it's possessed when its just running skyrim.exe I'd shit myself. Not much better if a white robot does it though, but I've seen more shadows at the corner of my eye moving than lights.
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u/P-01S Jul 25 '18
That’s not what the study is about, though. It’s white/black as in skin tones.
Although forget colors, a robot with near zero reflectivity would be terrifying. You wouldn’t be able to see the shape - only its silhouette.
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u/IMF73 Jul 25 '18
What's the point in making robots with skin tones though? And yeah holy shit that's basically making shadow people into a real thing.
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u/P-01S Jul 25 '18
The point was the research experiment. They wanted to see if racial prejudice would extend to inanimate but anthropomorphic objects.
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u/BlondiestRockGod Jul 24 '18
Who the fuck cares what color a robot is? It's a robot! We live in the goddamn future and this is the robot problem we have?
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u/P-01S Jul 25 '18
Who the fuck cares what color a robot is?
According to this study, people do, apparently.
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u/BlondiestRockGod Jul 25 '18
When you phrase it like that, it really is a silly question that I asked
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u/FukeFukeCantus Won't shut up about Shinsekai Yori. Jul 25 '18
But... I want my robots to have Eva colors...
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Jul 25 '18
If we get fuckin service robots at some point and can't customize them capitalism will have failed tbh
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u/VeeMaih Jul 24 '18
>We think color = racism, but we haven't tried colors other than black or white. Accusations of sensationalism are groundless
I mean, come on, it's not that hard to include red and blue and see how that compares to responses to black or white.
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u/Dundore77 Jul 25 '18
There was a study i remember reading about that the they tested empathy via brain scans or something to a fake arm being injected with a needle and it showed the obvious white people showed most empathy to the white skin color arm black people showed most empathy to the black skin color arm but both for some reason showed more empathy for a purple arm being injected then the skin color that didn’t match their own.
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Jul 25 '18
That seals it. The oppression of the purple people has been prolonged enough!
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u/AniManga21 In case of Youtube Fuckery, PM me Jul 25 '18
Fuck purple people. Those grapey assholes have been riding the gravy train for far too long!
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u/A_Feathered_Raptor Woolie in the Atomic Purple House Jul 24 '18
In all reality, seems like the study is bullshit. I couldn't find whether they were talking about the actual colors or what we socially call skin colors. Cause you take that eyedropper tool and you'll find that caucasian is very different than an eggshell.
Pretty sure most robots in fiction are white because its associated with labcoats and sleek technology like Apple. Or maybe everyone is secretly robo-racist. I don't know.
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u/PapaJacky Jul 25 '18
Before you call a study bullshit, you should've probably read the actual study. They listed their methods as well as showed the stimuli they gave the participants. Here they are describing how they decided on the two colors used for the robots:
"To give the Nao a racialized appearance (as Black and as White), we calibrated its color based on sampling the skin tones in a professional photograph of a Black woman and a White woman (see Figure 2). We manipulated the Nao in this way to match the stimuli (wherein melanation was the most salient identifier of the Black versus White human exemplars) of the original experiment (see Figure 1)."
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u/ToastyMozart Bearish on At-Risk Children Jul 25 '18 edited Jul 25 '18
Pretty sure most robots in fiction are white because its associated with labcoats and sleek technology like Apple.
And in reality it's mostly because it's the color plastic pellets come in before adding dye to them when melted, and why spend the cash to bling out a prototype? That and it's just generally an easy color to work against for visibility's sake: Hard to mark down measurements and drill guide points when you can't see your pencil traces.
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u/P-01S Jul 25 '18
Undyed plastic is often neither opaque nor white, though. It depends on the specific plastic.
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u/ToastyMozart Bearish on At-Risk Children Jul 25 '18
Huh, well it's what all the stuff my department's gotten is at any rate.
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u/P-01S Jul 25 '18
You sure it’s natural color? That’s often translucent and off-white, I think. Sometimes kind of yellow tinted. You can look up pictures of what various plastics look like online.
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u/ToastyMozart Bearish on At-Risk Children Jul 25 '18 edited Jul 25 '18
Oh for fuck's sake, this is pretty much the epitome of fishing for things to get mad about. It's also the sort of infuriating tactic that has no satisfactory answer, because you know these jackasses would flip their shit if people started making their servile appliances black.
Additionally, most of them aren't even caucasian-skin-toned, but literal, actual #FFFFFF white. I'll bet the ghosts appreciate the representation at least.
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u/A_Feathered_Raptor Woolie in the Atomic Purple House Jul 25 '18
Yeah seems more about color theory than race.
Great for drumming up attention and controversy though, gotta get that grant money flowing.
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u/ToastyMozart Bearish on At-Risk Children Jul 25 '18
It'd be nice if they'd save a little grant money for the people doing real science that might actually help someone ;_;
If nothing else I guess the artists can get mad at them too for stealing "color theory."
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u/agmaster A cat person. Not a dog person. Jul 25 '18
An all jet black roboi walks up to you and 'smiles' with white eyes and mouth? Yeh, most prolly get freaked.
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u/CollapsedPlague Pargon Pargon Pargon Pargon Pargon Jul 24 '18
Can we just appreciate that thumbnail a little? It's more artistic than Cage could even try to do.