Social Robots Boundaries, Potential, Challenges

Social robotics is a cutting edge research area gathering researchers and stakeholders from various disciplines and organizations. The transformational potential that these machines, in the form of, for example, caregiving, entertainment or partner robots, pose to our societies and to us as individuals seems to be limited by our technical limitations and phantasy alone. This collection contributes to the field of social robotics by exploring its boundaries from a philosophically informed standpoint. It constructively outlines central potentials and challenges and thereby also provides a stable fundament for further research of empirical, qualitative or methodological nature.

Contents: Preface. Part I Boundaries: On the significance of understanding in human-robot interaction, Julia Knifka; Making sense of empathy with sociable robots: a new look at the ‘imaginative perception of emotion’, Josh Redstone; Robots and the limits of morality, Raffaele Rodogno; What’s love got to do with it? Robots, sexuality, and the arts of being human, Charles M. Ess. Part II Potential: Ethics boards for research in robotics and artificial intelligence: is it too soon to act?, John P. Sullins; Technological dangers and the potential of human-robot interaction: a philosophical investigation of fundamental epistemological mechanisms of discrimination, Marco Nørskov; The uncanny valley: a working hypothesis, Adriano Angelucci, Pierluigi Graziani and Maria Grazia Rossi; Staging lies: performativity in the human-robot theatre play I, Worker, Gunhild Borggreen. Part III Challenges: Robots, humans, and the borders of the social world, Hironori Matsuzaki; The diffuse intelligent other: an ontology of nonlocalizable robots as moral and legal actors, Matthew E. Gladden; Gendered by design: gender codes in social robotics, Glenda Shaw-Garlock; Persuasive robotic technologies and the freedom of choice and action, Michele Rapoport.

Marco Nørskov is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas at Aarhus University, Denmark. Furthermore, he is a cooperative researcher at the Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories, ATR, Japan.