Public vs media opinion on robots and their evolution over recent years

Abstract

During recent years, the fast proliferation of robots in people’s everyday lives 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 Google News, Bing News, and Kickstarter, over an 8-year period and Twitter over a 1-year period, to quantify the public’s and media’s opinion about this emerging technology. The results of our analysis demonstrate that news platforms and the public take an overall positive position on robots. However, there is a deviation between news coverage and Twitter users’ attitudes. Among various robot types, sex robots raise the fiercest debate. Besides, based on our analysis the public and news media conceptualization of robotics has altered over recent years. More specifically, a shift from solely industrial-purpose machines, towards more social, assistive, and multi-purpose gadgets is visible.