“…and these robots will not take kindly to being pushed around by inferior human beings. I mean, have you seen Terminator or The Matrix? It’s not gonna be pretty!” Somehow this charming argument arose repeatedly in my “Memory and the Construction of Identity & Culture” course in college. The class was supposed to be about the human experience, but inevitably, someone would incorporate a masterful segue and move us right back to robots taking over the world.

As a vocal fan of Team Human, I got pretty worked up by the suggestion that robots would overtake us. Some classmates even accused me of having an unfounded bias against robots. Well today, I bring proof humans rule. Below are two pieces of research showing man beating machine in the game of accountability—my favorite.

1) The SLOW sign-holder

I used to chuckle whenever I drove through a road construction site and saw someone holding up the “SLOW” sign. I would concoct fanciful scenarios about how that person ended up getting that job that day. (e.g. “Mike, your baby kept you up all night, and we don’t want you snoozing on the asphalt roller…so you’ve got SLOW duty today.”) I also wondered if that was really an effective use of human resources.

Turns out…it is!

A scintillating report from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics summarizes research results on different measures for speed reduction. It turns out, we motorists respond to the flagging (i.e. the guys with SLOW signs) with a 19% speed reduction, while the digital signing only gets a 7% speed reduction. That’s almost triple the results; take that machines! And it makes sense. Isn’t it harder to ignore a human being looking you in the eye than it is to ignore a sign?

2) Calling on exercisers

The Wall Street Journal recently covered a fascinating study on exercise from Stanford University. In it, just over 200 people established exercise goals and were divided into three groups. The first group received regular phone calls from a human asking about their exercise habits. The second received a pre-recorded phone call. The third group got no communication.

Well, one year later, the exercise results revealed:

• Human-supported group: exercised 2 hours and 58 minutes a week
• Automatically-supported group: exercised 2 hours and 37 minutes a week
• No contact: exercised 1 hour and 58 minutes a week

Updated score… Humans: 2 | Robots: 0.

An extra 21 minutes of exercise a week can really add up over a year and a lifetime. Spreadsheet fun below:

With this research in hand, I’m even more confident that my classmates were mistaken. Bret and Jemaine’s frightening vision will never come to fruition…