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Social and Moral Relationships with Robots: Genetic Epistemology in an Exponentially Increasing Technological World

It has been happening for centuries. New technologies are invented that reshape individual thought and restructure social life. The emergence of the printing press, for example, provided access to written language for millions of people. In so doing, it gave rise to new forms of mental representations and to a powerful new means for the accretion of knowledge across generations. We would like to suggest that an equally astonishing technology is on the immediate horizon: social embodied technological networked entities. For purposes here we will narrow the class of these entities to perhaps their most canonical form: social robots. These robots embody aspects of people insofar as they have a persona, are adaptive and autonomous, and can talk, learn, use natural cues, and self-organize. One such humanoid robot, Robovie, was used as a museum guide at the Osaka Science Museum in Japan, and autonomously led groups of children around the museum, and conversed with them [Shiomi, Kanda, Ishiguro, & Hagita, 2007]. In the near future, think of a child coming home from school and interacting with a robot nanny or a robot friend [Tanaka, Cicourel, & Movellan, 2007]. Or think of an elderly person who is assisted in the home by a robot caretaker and who finds company through interaction with the robot [Sparrow & Sparrow, 2006]. Or, building conceptually on early software programs like ELIZA [Weizenbaum, 1966], think of patients in sessions with a robot therapist. These scenarios are not just science fiction any more. They are in research laboratories and will soon emerge in common life. These robots will not only change our everyday lives but the way we think about what constitutes a social and moral other . We’ve been finding this to be so in our collaborative research. In one study, for example, 90 children (9-, 12-, and 15-year-olds) initially interacted with the humanoid robot Robovie in 15-minute sessions [Kahn et al., 2012a]. Each session ended when an experimenter interrupted Robovie’s turn at a game and, against Robovie’s stated moral objections – based on moral considerations of fairness and psychological harm to itself – put Robovie into a closet. Each child was then engaged in a