Stories About the Future

Anxiety about automation of large classes of jobs creates an area of research around how to evolve the workforce in parallel to advances in robotic technology. Gaining meaningful experience with robots, such as studying them in school, is not an option for every American, leaving media and stories to fill the void. This paper first presents analysis of popular narratives about robots, finding largely negative and violent depictions in popular movies. Then, the paper reports on an initial experiment with human participants on existing attitudes about robots and how those may change with meaningful, non-narrative exposure to these machines. A pilot study with 12 participants was designed and deployed in a targeted community. Initial findings, along with directions for future work, are discussed. The accessible, exhibit-like design of this work, may be a scalable framework that can make it possible for more people to gain real-life experiences with robots.