Computational Modelling Of Robot Personhood And Relationality

This SpringerBrief is a computational study of significant concerns and their role in forming long-term relationships between intelligent entities. Significant concerns include attitudes, preferences, affinities, and values that are held to be highly valued and meaningful: The means through which a person may find deeply held identity, purpose, and transformation. Significant concerns always engage the emotions and senses in a way that simply holding an opinion may or may not. For example, experiencing a significant concern may provoke deep feelings of awe and wonder in a way that deciding what to have for lunch probably does not, even if the lunch decision involves a rich array of preferences and values. Significant concerns also include what Emmons has called ultimate concerns. The author builds upon this base by considering the hypothetical case of intelligence in androids. An android is defined as a human-like robot that humans would accept as equal to humans in how they perform and behave in society. An android as defined in this book is not considered to be imitating a human, nor is its purpose to deceive humans into believing that it is a human. Instead, the appropriately programmed android self-identifies as a non-human with its own integrity as a person. Therefore, a computational understanding of personhood and how persons – whether human or android – participate in relationships is essential to this perspective on artificial intelligence. Computational Modelling of Robot Personhood and Relationality describes in technical detail an implementation of a computational model called Affinity that takes the form of a simulation of a population of entities that form, maintain, and break relationships with each other depending upon a rich range of values, motivations, attitudes, and beliefs. Future experimentation and improvements of this model may be used not only to gain a wider understanding of human persons but may also form a preliminary cognitive model of the reasoning process of an android.

An exponentially growing industry, human robot interaction (HRI) research has drawn predominantly upon psychologists’ descriptions of mechanisms of face-to-face dyadic interactions. This book considers how social robotics is beginning unwittingly to confront an impasse that has been a perennial dilemma for psychology, associated with the historical ‘science vs. art’ debate. Raya Jones examines these paradigmatic tensions, and, in tandem, considers ways in which the technology-centred discourse both reflects and impacts upon understanding our relational nature. Chapters in the book explore not only how the technology-centred discourse constructs machines as us, but also how humans feature in this discourse. Focusing on how the social interaction is conceptualised when the human-robot interaction is discussed, this book addresses issues such as the long-term impact on persons and society, authenticity of relationships, and challenges to notions of personhood. By leaving aside terminological issues, Jones attempts to transcend ritual of pitching theories against each other in order to comprehensively analyse terms such as subjectivity, self and personhood and their fluid interplay in the world that we inhabit. Personhood and Social Robotics will be a key text for postgraduate students, researchers and scholars interested in the connection between technology and human psychology, including psychologists, science and technology studies scholars, media studies scholars and humanists. The book will also be of interest to roboticists and HRI researchers, as well as those studying or working in areas of artificial intelligence and interactive technologies more generally.

Current robots and other artificial systems are typically able to accomplish only one single task. Overcoming this limitation requires the development of control architectures and learning algorithms that can support the acquisition and deployment of several different skills, which in turn seems to require a modular and hierarchical organization. In this way, different modules can acquire different skills without catastrophic interference, and higher-level components of the system can solve complex tasks by exploiting the skills encapsulated in the lower-level modules. While machine learning and robotics recognize the fundamental importance of the hierarchical organization of behavior for building robots that scale up to solve complex tasks, research in psychology and neuroscience shows increasing evidence that modularity and hierarchy are pivotal organization principles of behavior and of the brain. They might even lead to the cumulative acquisition of an ever-increasing number of skills, which seems to be a characteristic of mammals, and humans in particular. This book is a comprehensive overview of the state of the art on the modeling of the hierarchical organization of behavior in animals, and on its exploitation in robot controllers. The book perspective is highly interdisciplinary, featuring models belonging to all relevant areas, including machine learning, robotics, neural networks, and computational modeling in psychology and neuroscience. The book chapters review the authors' most recent contributions to the investigation of hierarchical behavior, and highlight the open questions and most promising research directions. As the contributing authors are among the pioneers carrying out fundamental work on this topic, the book covers the most important and topical issues in the field from a computationally informed, theoretically oriented perspective. The book will be of benefit to academic and industrial researchers and graduate students in related disciplines.

Once the stuff of science fiction, recent progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning means that these rapidly advancing technologies are finally coming into widespread use within everyday life. Such rapid development in these areas also brings with it a host of social, political and legal issues, as well as a rise in public concern and academic interest in the ethical challenges these new technologies pose. This volume is a collection of scholarly work from leading figures in the development of both robot ethics and machine ethics; it includes essays of historical significance which have become foundational for research in these two new areas of study, as well as important recent articles. The research articles selected focus on the control and governance of computational systems; the exploration of ethical and moral theories using software and robots as laboratories or simulations; inquiry into the necessary requirements for moral agency and the basis and boundaries of rights; and questions of how best to design systems that are both useful and morally sound. Collectively the articles ask what the practical ethical and legal issues, arising from the development of robots, will be over the next twenty years and how best to address these future considerations.

We present a systematic survey of computational research in humanrobot interaction (HRI) over the past decade. Computational HRI is the subset of the field that is specifically concerned with the algorithms, techniques, models, and frameworks necessary to build robotic systems that engage in social interactions with humans. Within the field of robotics, HRI poses distinct computational challenges in each of the traditional core research areas: perception, manipulation, planning, task execution, navigation, and learning. These challenges are addressed by the research literature surveyed here. We surveyed twelve publication venues and include work that tackles computational HRI challenges, categorized into eight topics: (a) perceiving humans and their activities; (b) generating and understanding verbal expression; (c) generating and understanding non-verbal behaviors; (d) modeling, expressing, and understanding emotional states; (e) recognizing and conveying intentional action; (f) collaborating with humans; (g) navigating with and around humans; and (h) learning from humans in a social manner. For each topic, we suggest promising future research areas.

Computational Human-Robot Interaction provides the reader with a systematic overview of the field of Human-Robot Interaction over the past decade, with a focus on the computational frameworks, algorithms, techniques, and models currently used to enable robots to interact with humans.

A provocative attempt to think about what was previously considered unthinkable: a serious philosophical case for the rights of robots. We are in the midst of a robot invasion, as devices of different configurations and capabilities slowly but surely come to take up increasingly important positions in everyday social reality—self-driving vehicles, recommendation algorithms, machine learning decision making systems, and social robots of various forms and functions. Although considerable attention has already been devoted to the subject of robots and responsibility, the question concerning the social status of these artifacts has been largely overlooked. In this book, David Gunkel offers a provocative attempt to think about what has been previously regarded as unthinkable: whether and to what extent robots and other technological artifacts of our own making can and should have any claim to moral and legal standing. In his analysis, Gunkel invokes the philosophical distinction (developed by David Hume) between “is” and “ought” in order to evaluate and analyze the different arguments regarding the question of robot rights. In the course of his examination, Gunkel finds that none of the existing positions or proposals hold up under scrutiny. In response to this, he then offers an innovative alternative proposal that effectively flips the script on the is/ought problem by introducing another, altogether different way to conceptualize the social situation of robots and the opportunities and challenges they present to existing moral and legal systems.

Social institutions emerge from social practices which coordinate activities by the explicit statement of rules, goals, and values. When artificial social actors are introduced into the physical and symbolic space of institutions, will this affect or transform institutional structures and practices, and how can social robotics as an interdisciplinary endeavor contribute to the ability of our institutions to perform their functions in society? This book presents the proceedings of Robophilosophy 2022, the 5th in the biennial Robophilosophy conference series, held in Helsinki, Finland, from 16 to 19 August 2022. The theme of this edition of the conference was Social Robots in Social Institutions, and it featured international multidisciplinary research from the humanities and social sciences concerning social robotics. The 63 papers, 41 workshop papers and 5 posters included in this book are divided into 4 sections: plenaries, sessions, workshops and posters, with the 41 papers in the ‘Sessions’ section grouped into 13 subdivisions including elderly care, healthcare, law, education and art, as well as ethics and religion. These papers explore the anticipated conceptual and practical changes which will come about from the introduction of social robotics into public and private institutions, such as public services, legal systems, social and healthcare services or educational institutions. Offering an exploration of the societal significance of social robots for the future of social institutions, the book will be of interest to both researchers in robotics and to those working in social institutions and enterprises.