Living with Robots

From artificial intelligence to artificial empathy, “a timely and well-written volume that addresses many contemporary and future moral questions” (Library Journal).

Today’s robots engage with human beings in socially meaningful ways, as therapists, trainers, mediators, caregivers, and companions. Social robotics is grounded in artificial intelligence, but the field’s most probing questions explore the nature of the very real human emotions that social robots are designed to emulate.

Social roboticists conduct their inquiries out of necessity—every robot they design incorporates and tests a number of hypotheses about human relationships. Paul Dumouchel and Luisa Damiano show that as roboticists become adept at programming artificial empathy into their creations, they are abandoning the conventional conception of human emotions as discrete, private, internal experiences. Rather, they are reconceiving emotions as a continuum between two actors who coordinate their affective behavior in real time. Rethinking the role of sociability in emotion has also led the field of social robotics to interrogate a number of human ethical assumptions, and to formulate a crucial political insight: there are simply no universal human characteristics for social robots to emulate. What we have instead is a plurality of actors, human and nonhuman, in noninterchangeable relationships.

Foreshadowing an inflection point in human evolution, Living with Robots shows that for social robots to be effective, they must be attentive to human uniqueness and exercise a degree of social autonomy. More than mere automatons, they must become social actors, capable of modifying the rules that govern their interplay with humans.

“A detailed tour of the philosophy of artificial intelligence (AI)?especially as it applies to robots intended to build social relationships with humanity. . . . If we are to build a robust, appropriate ethical structure around the next generation of technical development?some combination of deep learning, artificial intelligence, robotics and artificial empathy?we need to understand that managing the impact of these technologies is far too important to be left to those who are enthusiastically engaged in producing them.” —Times Higher Education

© 2017 Harvard University Press (Ebook): 9780674982857

Translators: Malcolm DeBevoise

Release date

Ebook: 6 November 2017