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Whitney Cummings: Compassion Toward Robots | AI Podcast Clips


Transcript

I have never seen such compassion from a lot of people in my life toward any human, animal, child as I have a lot of people in the way they interact with the robot. Compassion. I think there's something of, I mean I was on the robot owners chat boards for a good eight months and the main emotional benefit is she's never going to cheat on you, she's never going to hurt you, she's never going to lie to you, she doesn't judge you.

I think that robots help people and this is part of the work I do with animals, like I do equine therapy and train dogs and stuff because there is this safe space to be authentic. You're with this being that doesn't care what you do for a living, doesn't care how much money you have, doesn't care who you're dating, doesn't care what you look like, doesn't care if you have cellulite, whatever, you feel safe to be able to truly be present without being defensive and worrying about eye contact and being triggered by needing to be perfect and fear of judgment and all that.

Robots really can't judge you yet, but they can't judge you and I think it really puts people at ease and at their most authentic. Do you think you can have a deep connection with a robot that's not judging or do you think you can really have a relationship with a robot or a human being that's a safe space or is attention, mystery, danger necessary for a deep connection?

I'm going to speak for myself and say that I grew up in Alcoa, Colombo. I identify as a codependent, talked about this stuff before, but for me it's very hard to be in a relationship with a human being without feeling like I need to perform in some way or deliver in some way.

I don't know if that's just the people I've been in a relationship with or me or my brokenness, but I do think this is going to sound really negative and pessimistic, but I do think a lot of our relationships are projection and a lot of our relationships are performance and I don't think I really understood that until I worked with horses and most communications human is nonverbal, right?

I can say like, "I love you," but you don't think I love you, right? Whereas with animals, it's very direct. It's all physical. It's all energy. I feel like that with robots too. It feels very, how I say something doesn't matter. My inflection doesn't really matter. When you thinking that my tone is disrespectful, like you're not filtering it through all of the bad relationships you've been in.

You're not filtering it through the way your mom talked to you. You're not getting triggered. I find that for the most part, people don't always receive things the way that you intend them to or the way intended and that makes relationships really murky.