Ontological and Anthropological Dimensions of Social Robotics

2000

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

Normative Multi-Agent Systems

AISB 2008 Convention Communication, Interaction and …, 2008

Like computers before them, social robots can be used as a fundamental research tool. Indeed, they can help us to turn our attention from putative inner modules to thinking about the flow and emergence of human intellectual powers. In so doing, much can be gained from seeking solutions to MacDorman’s person problem: how can human bodies – and perhaps robot bodies – attune to cultural norms and, by so doing, construct themselves into persons? This paper explores the hypothesis that social robots can be used to ask fundamental questions about the nature of human agency. For social robots to live up to their name, the focus needs to fall on functional co-ordination and co-action. This enables one to link research on how today’s robots function as social mediators with engineering approaches that explore both how understanding can be hard-wired, how this influences the cultural ecology and, perhaps, in designing robots that can discover how we enact values. To do this new kinds of collaboration need to be established. The key theoretical question is whether, in becoming persons, humans depend on embodiment alone or, as suggested here, intrinsic motive formation enables them to discover the distributed forms of embodiment favoured by culture.

2016

The robotics industry is growing rapidly, and to a large extent the development of this market sector is due to the area of social robotics—the production of robots that are designed to enter the space of human social interaction, both physically and semantically. Since social robots present a new type of social agent, they have been aptly classified as a disruptive technology, i.e. the sort of technology which affects the core of our current social practices and might lead to profound cultural and social change. Due to its disruptive and innovative potential, social robotics raises not only questions about utility, ethics, and legal aspects, but calls for “robo-philosophy”—the comprehensive philosophical reflection from the perspectives of all philosophical disciplines. This book presents the proceedings of the first conference in this new area, “Robo-Philosophy 2014 – Sociable Robots and the Future of Social Relations, held in Aarhus, Denmark, in August 2014. The short papers and abstracts collected here address questions of social robotics from the perspectives of philosophy of mind, social ontology, ethics, meta-ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, intercultural philosophy, and metaphilosophy. Social robotics is still in its early stages, but it is precisely now that we need to reflect its possible cultural repercussions. This book is accessible to a wide readership and will be of interest to everyone involved in the development and use of social robotics applications, from social roboticists to policy makers.

NanoEthics

In this paper we present a review of recent developments in AI towards the possibility of an artificial intelligence equals that of human intelligence. AI technology has always shown a stepwise increase in its capacity and complexity. The last step took place several years ago, with the increased progress in deep neural network technology. Each such step goes hand in hand with our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of human cognition. Indeed, AI was always about the question of understanding human nature. AI percolates into our lives, changing our environment. We believe that the next few steps in AI technology, and in our understanding of human behavior, will bring about much more powerful machines, flexible enough to resemble human behavior. In this context, there are two research fields: Artificial Social Intelligence (ASI) and General Artificial Intelligence (AGI). The authors also allude to one of the main challenges for AI, embodied cognition, and explain how it ...

2004

Abstract As robot technology is evolving and creating a social community between humans and robots, it is necessary to research and develop a new type of intelligence, which we refer to as" social intelligence''. Social intelligence enables natural and socially appropriate interactions. Its importance is gaining a growing interest among not just the human-computer interaction researchers but also robot technology researchers and developers.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

Social robots need intelligence in order to safely coexist and interact with humans. Robots without functional abilities in understanding others and unable to empathise might be a societal risk and they may lead to a society of socially impaired robots. In this work we provide a survey of three relevant human social disorders, namely autism, psychopathy and schizophrenia, as a means to gain a better understanding of social robots’ future capability requirements. We provide evidence supporting the idea that social robots will require a combination of emotional intelligence and social intelligence, namely socio-emotional intelligence. We argue that a robot with a simple socio-emotional process requires a simulation-driven model of intelligence. Finally, we provide some critical guidelines for designing future socio-emotional robots.