Public vs Media Opinion on Robots

TL;DR

This study analyzes eight years of social media and news data to understand public and media opinions on robots, revealing overall positivity but notable debates on sex robots and evolving perceptions from industrial to social and assistive robots.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive longitudinal analysis of public and media sentiment towards robots, highlighting shifts in perception and specific debates like sex robots.

Findings

Overall positive attitude in news and public opinion

Debate on sex robots is the fiercest

Shift from industrial to social and assistive robots

Abstract

Fast proliferation of robots in people's everyday lives during recent years calls for a profound examination of public consensus, which is the ultimate determinant of the future of this industry. This paper investigates text corpora, consisting of posts in Twitter, Google News, Bing News, and Kickstarter, over an 8 year period to quantify the public and media opinion about this emerging technology. Results demonstrate that the news platforms and the public take an overall positive position on robots. However, there is a deviation between news coverage and people's attitude. Among various robot types, sex robots raise the fiercest debate. Besides, our evaluation reveals that the public and news media conceptualization of robotics has altered over the recent years. More specifically, a shift from the solely industrial-purposed machines, towards more social, assistive, and multi-purpose gadgets is visible.