A simple survey for robot adaption

The buzz on the AI is deafening, one need only pick a current issue of any news paper and he will be rewarded with news about some machine with learning abilities. With all the buzz around artificial intelligence it would seem that the world is ready to embrace a walking talking humanoid, with all the goodness of great service minus the emotional baggage to direct their responses, a true stoic, immune to the pangs of hidden spears in human conversation and free from burdens of emotional accommodation. One would think, but generalizing a specialized opinion to the affirmation of masses sometimes have unintended postulations, incorrect most of the time.
To get a gentle feel of how the masses think about it, I set out to perform a small (due to the out of pocket minimums I apply to such endeavors) and simple because I wanted to get a sweeping, yes and no opinion, which we are not going to generalize, but we can take a look and muse in it. If you haven't used, I will recommend trying out Google consumer surveys they are easy to setup and one can do some nice opinion gathering.

Although autonomous cars, voice activated/controlled devices and speech recognition on every smart device is a flag bearer of AI advances, I feel the true test of AI will be the robots.
The first question I asked was simply a perception of people on Robot adaption. Robots as servers is a bit easy I wanted to go bit more bullish on the AI side so I chose a more demanding profession for the robots in my survey, retail sales associate. The first question was

• Autonomous Robots will replace human sales associates in:

Asimo may be a stretch of imagination but I still expected a bit more optimism on the prospects. I also wanted to see if people were mentally prepared for dealing with a robot if they ever encountered one in sales situation hence the question

• I am(will be) comfortable asking questions to a robot in store

Interesting enough very few people were concerned about the look of the robot, my guess is that most have not seen the headless bipedal ostrich. I would think that the best way to adaption will be through familiar robots, especially for children, any one thinking of Anpanman.

My next thought was to figure out the "tech savviness" of my audience so I threw in few question about their online shopping behavior as well as their adaption of voice devices and mobile shopping.

This was a more expected response, the more people bought online (a proxy for their adaption of non human buying behavior) the more receptive they were of robots. Maybe we will see some robots in Amazon go stores.

• Overall what % of your shopping is online (excluding Groceries)?

The same effect was observed for the group of high online buying adapters being more receptive to non human interaction.

• Overall what % of your shopping is online (excluding Groceries)?

There are couple of other ways to look at the picture using the demographic filters of gender and age, or device adaption behavior of using Mobile for shopping or voice activated home devices.  One thing that I found interesting was; of the people in age group 18 to 44 that shopped 75% or more online, not one individual said they will try to find human irrespective of their gender. If I have to guess, I think robots will pop soon, but first as more static answering machines in retail and then to more interactive assistants finally to autonomous helpers. Although I won't mind walking into a store, activate a robot, that walks along my side through the isles, answers my questions, looks up inventory, gives me suggestions, brings up deals etc, I would prefer C3PO as good company but will settle for R2D2 or BB8.