Study Suggests That You Will Obey Your Future Robot Boss

If you're lucky, you may not lose your job to a robot in the future. That doesn't, however, mean that your boss won't lose his or her job to a robot in the future. And if (when) that happens, what's it going to be like working for a robot? A study from the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, suggests that you'll probably obey them nearly as predictably as you would a human. Here's how this experiment worked, and I'm going to do some copying and pasting from the paper because a.) it's very well written and does a great job of explaining things and b.) it's late and I'm tired. But the important thing to know going in is that the experiment was designed to try to get participants to do an incredibly boring task that they really didn't want to do, and then see if they either spent 80 minutes working on it, or objected five separate times despite verbal prodding to continue.