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About

Paul Dumouchel is a philosopher whose work sits at the compelling intersection of social robotics, human emotion, and the evolving relationship between humans and machines. His research has fundamentally shaped how scholars understand anthropomorphism not as a cognitive failing but as an evolved social mechanism — a perspective developed most influentially in "Anthropomorphism in Human–Robot Co-evolution" (2018, 243 citations), which remains his most widely cited contribution. Alongside co-author Luisa Damiano, his book *Living with Robots* (2017, 67 citations) traced robotics' pivotal shift from artificial intelligence toward artificial empathy, anticipating profound questions about human emotional life in an age of social machines. Dumouchel's broader project explores what he terms "affective co-evolution" — the idea that humans and robots mutually shape one another's emotional and social capacities. His work engages ethical dimensions too, from the vulnerability of embodied robots to the organizational dangers of lethal autonomous weapons systems. Throughout, he demonstrates a rare ability to bridge philosophy of mind, ethics, and robotics engineering. For students navigating the rapidly expanding field of human-robot interaction, Dumouchel's scholarship offers both rigorous conceptual foundations and genuinely provocative questions about what it means to be human alongside increasingly social machines.