> are there factors (likely) in the robot's appearance or behavior which make negative interactions more likely?
I have to be honest, my first gut-reaction was this sounds like victim blaming.[1]
My second, after a moment to think, reaction is that that this is actually probably a lot closer that that phenomenon and the aspects that lead to it than I previously thought.
I think along the spectrum of "things that look alive and things that don't" (as in the experiment in the article where kids hold different things upside down), it extends all the way to "people that look or act like me and people that don't" which is how we get some of our more unsettling social behaviors.
Part of this is, as creators, taking care to not trigger negative social behaviors if we can, but it definitely feels like there's a social and cultural aspect we're still working on.
As a simple example, if a machine was able to demonstrate sentience and sapience, what percentage of people would be willing to treat it as such. I imagine it depends quite a bit on the country in question, and possibly region within country. Religion might matter quite a bit as well. If a machine is too abstract, or you get to caught up in whether true general AI is possible or likely, what about an alien intelligence? Should that difference matter?
1: I'm presenting this more as a general thought-piece, so hopefully the parent comment or anyone else that made similar comments doesn't take this as an attack, it's really not meant that way. I've made similar comments and thought similarly.