Ibn Sina Steps Out: Exploring Arabic Attitudes Toward Humanoid Robots

Abstract

As humanoid robot technology makes its way into the global economy, it is important for robot designers to try to under- stand the variety of cultural attitudes that exist throughout the world. However, to our knowledge, no one has yet surveyed Middle Eastern attitudes on this topic. We aim to try to bridge this gap. In particular, we wanted to understand how Arabic people might view having hu- manoid robots in their daily lives, and developed a questionnaire to understand these views. We also built an end-to-end Arabic conver- sational system on our humanoid robot Ibn Sina, and brought the robot to a mall in the United Arab Emirates. At the mall we en- couraged people to interact with the robot as well as complete our questionnaire. With 131 respondents from 21 countries, our find- ings show significant regional differences in overall attitudes (people from the Gulf viewed humanoid robots more favorably than people from Africa), as well as an effect from college education (people with college degrees viewed humanoid robots less favorably than people without college degrees). Category: Exploratory studies (*E*)