Close Engagements With Artificial Companions

What will it be like to admit Artificial Companions into our society? How will they change our relations with each other? How important will they be in the emotional and practical lives of their owners since we know that people became emotionally dependent even on simple devices like the Tamagotchi? How much social life might they have in contacting each other? The contributors to this book discuss the possibility and desirability of some form of long-term computer Companions now being a certainty in the coming years. It is a good moment to consider, from a set of wide interdisciplinary perspectives, both how we shall construct them technically as well as their personal philosophical and social consequences. By Companions we mean conversationalists or confidants not robots but rather computer software agents whose function will be to get to know their owners over a long period. Those may well be elderly or lonely, and the contributions in the book focus not only on assistance via the internet (contacts, travel, doctors etc.) but also on providing company and Companionship, by offering aspects of real personalization."

What will it be like to admit Artificial Companions into our society? How will they change our relations with each other? How important will they be in the emotional and practical lives of their owners – since we know that people became emotionally dependent even on simple devices like the Tamagotchi? How much social life might they have in contacting each other? The contributors to this book discuss the possibility and desirability of some form of long-term computer Companions now being a certainty in the coming years. It is a good moment to consider, from a set of wide interdisciplinary perspectives, both how we shall construct them technically as well as their personal philosophical and social consequences. By Companions we mean conversationalists or confidants – not robots – but rather computer software agents whose function will be to get to know their owners over a long period. Those may well be elderly or lonely, and the contributions in the book focus not only on assistance via the internet (contacts, travel, doctors etc.) but also on providing company and Companionship, by offering aspects of real personalization.

The Law of the Future and the Future of Law is a unique collection of 'think pieces' in which a wide variety of experts share their thoughts on how they envision the future of law. By asking the question -What do you see as the most significant challenges for the development of the law? What developments are we likely to see in the coming two to three decades? What do those developments mean for national legal systems as a whole?- the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL) has canvassed the views of a large number of renowned experts in particular areas of law. This volume was prepared as part of the Law of the Future Joint Action Programme and as the basis of the Law of the Future Conference on 23 and 24 June 2011. The Law of the Future Joint Action Programme is based on the premise that prospective thinking about law is not only desirable but also required in order to ensure that law and legal systems do not become obsolete, ineffective or unjust. The aim is to set a world standard in thinking ahead, to guide decision makers today. For more information, visit www.lawofthefuture.org.

Affective Computing is a growing multidisciplinary field encompassing computer science, engineering, psychology, education, neuroscience, and many other disciplines. It explores how affective factors influence interactions between humans and technology, how affect sensing and affect generation techniques can inform our understanding of human affect, and on the design, implementation, and evaluation of systems that intricately involve affect at their core. The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing will help both new and experienced researchers identify trends, concepts, methodologies, and applications in this burgeouning field. The volume features 41 chapters divided into five main sections: history and theory, detection, generation, methodologies, and applications. Section One begins with a look at the makings of AC and a historical review of the science of emotion. Chapters discuss the theoretical underpinnings of AC from an interdisciplinary perspective involving the affective, cognitive, social, media, and brain sciences. Section Two focuses on affect detection or affect recognition, which is one of the most commonly investigated areas in AC. Section Three examines aspects of affect generation including the synthesis of emotion and its expression via facial features, speech, postures and gestures. Cultural issues in affect generation are also discussed. Section Four features chapters on methodological issues in AC research, including data collection techniques, multimodal affect databases, emotion representation formats, crowdsourcing techniques, machine learning approaches, affect elicitation techniques, useful AC tools, and ethical issues in AC. Finally, Section Five highlights existing and future applications of AC in domains such as formal and informal learning, games, robotics, virtual reality, autism research, healthcare, cyberpsychology, music, deception, reflective writing, and cyberpsychology. With chapters authored by world leaders in each area, The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing is suitable for use as a textbook in undergraduate or graduate courses in AC, and will serve as a valuable resource for students, researchers, and practitioners across the globe.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Third International Conference on Human-Robot Personal Relationships, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in June 2010. The 16 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers and 1 keynote lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. The papers feature and discuss studies of personal relationships with artificial partners, their formation, their possibilities and their consequences. Such personal relationships are increasingly attracting attention from scientific fields as (social) robotics, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, sociology.

"This book presents the proceedings of the First International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA 2010), which is also the First Annual Meeting of the BICA Society. A cognitive architecture is a computational framework for the design of intelligent, even conscious, agents. It may draw inspiration from many sources, such as pure mathematics, physics or abstract theories of cognition. A biologically inspired cognitive architecture (BICA) is one which incorporates formal mechanisms from computational models of human and animal cognition, which currently provide the only physical examples with the robustness, flexibility, scalability and consciousness that artificial intelligence aspires to achieve. The BICA approach has several different goals: the broad aim of creating intelligent software systems without focusing on any one area of application; attempting to accurately simulate human behavior or gain an understanding of how the human mind works, either for purely scientific reasons or for applications in a variety of domains; understanding how the brain works at a neuronal and sub-neuronal level; or designing artificial systems which can perform the cognitive tasks important to practical applications in human society, and which at present only humans are capable of. The papers presented in this volume reflect the cross-disciplinarity and integrative nature of the BICA approach and will be of interest to anyone developing their own approach to cognitive architectures. Many insights can be found here for inspiration or to import into one's own architecture, directly or in modified form."--Publisher description.

The subject of social robotics has enormous projected economic significance. However, social robots not only present us with novel opportunities but also with novel risks that go far beyond safety issues. It is a potentially highly disruptive technology which could negatively affect the most valuable parts of the fabric of human social interactions in irreparable ways. Since engineering educations do not yet offer the necessary competences to analyze, holistically assess, and constructively mitigate these risks, new alliances must be established between engineering and SSH disciplines, with special emphasis on the humanities (i.e. disciplines specializing in the analysis of socio-cultural interactions and human experience). The Robophilosophy Conference Series was established in 2014 with the purpose of creating a new forum and catalyzing the research discussion in this important area of applied humanities research, with focus on robophilosophy. Robophilosophy conferences have been the world’s largest venues for humanities research in and on social robotics. The book at hand presents the proceedings of Robophilosophy Conference 2020: Culturally Sustainable Social Robotics, the fourth event in the international, biennial Robophilosophy Conference Series, which brought together close to 400 participants from 29 countries. The speakers of the conference, whose contributions are collected in this volume, were invited to offer concrete proposals for how the Humanities can help to shape a future where social robotics is guided by the goals of enhancing socio-cultural values rather than by utility alone. The book is divided into 3 parts; Abstracts of Plenaries, which contains 6 plenary sessions; Session Papers, with 44 papers under 8 thematic categories; and Workshops, containing 25 items on 5 selected topics. Providing concrete proposals from philosophers and other SSH researchers for new models and methods, this book will be of interest to all those involved in developing artificial ‘social’ agents in a culturally sustainable way that is also – a fortiori – ethically responsible.