Public vs Media Opinion on Robots
This study addresses the need to understand public consensus on robots, which is crucial for the industry's future, though it is incremental in analyzing existing data sources.
The paper quantified public and media opinions on robots over eight years using text corpora from social media and news platforms, finding overall positive attitudes but a deviation between news coverage and public sentiment, with sex robots generating the most debate.
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.