Social and moral relationships with robotic others?

Abstract

This work investigates the social and potentially moral relationships that humans have with what we refer to as robotic others. Our investigation begins by responding to some recent work in the literature that seeks to carve out the construct of "social robots". The construct is intriguing, yet in our view it may not be optimally framed to address two central issues. The first issue involves the ontological status of robots, of whether they currently are or in the future can actually be social. The second issue focuses psychologically on the nature of the human-robotic relationship, about how humans can and often do respond quickly and powerfully in social terms to robots, but also how the relationship is psychologically impoverished, may be fundamentally, especially from a moral perspective. To advance our argument, we draw on our research over the last few years on people's relationships with Sony's robotic dog AlBO, particularly one of our studies that analyzes the type of issues that people discuss in AIBO online discussion forums. Finally, building on our conceptual and empirical analyses, we offer five central considerations toward framing the human relationship with robotic others.