Tobias Störzinger

Emotional robotics represents a trend. On the one hand, emotions seem to be essential to enhance the cognitive performance of artificial systems. On the other hand, emotions are supposed to make the interaction of robots with humans more intuitive and natural. In social contexts, recognizing and displaying emotions even seems to be indispensable. This volume addresses the theoretical foundations and possibilities of emotional robotics and explores its social consequences and ethical assessment. It combines two perspectives: (1) research on the nature of emotions and their implementation in artificial systems and (2) current work in emotional human-robot interaction (HRI) from a theoretical and ethical point of view. The first chapter gives an overview of the state of the art and provides the framework for situating the individual contributions of this volume.

Can machines simulate, express or even have emotions? Is it a good to build such machines? How do humans react emotionally to them and how should such devices be treated from a moral point of view? This volume addresses these and related questions by bringing together perspectives from affective computing and emotional human-machine interaction, combining technological approaches with those from the humanities and social sciences. It thus relates disciplines such as philosophy, computer science, technology, psychology, sociology, design, and art. The volume offers readers interested in the phenomenon of emotional machines new perspectives from a variety of disciplines and addresses fundamental questions that will become pressing in the foreseeable future as emotional machines increasingly populate our everyday lives.

Using a practice-theoretical perspective on sociality, we investigate which social practices are reserved for humans. We argue that especially those practices that require participants to reciprocally recognize each other as persons clash with the conceptual understanding of robots. Furthermore, the paper provides reasons why this understanding of robots can be defended against a conception that wants to attribute the status of persons to robots based on their behavior. The simulated evaluative attitudes of robots are not rooted in the robots themselves but turn out instead to be merely opinion amplifiers of their developers or sociotechnical echo chambers of the users. However, we also argue that building robots that can perfectly simulate recognition claims nevertheless poses a problem since such devices would distort our social practices.

This paper presents an alternative model to the rule-following model of social practices and draws implications for the possibility of integrating robots into the social realm. We differentiate between “maximally loose” and “maximally rigid” forms of social practices and show that especially the latter pose a problem for social robotics. Not only is it a technical challenge to enable robots to function like human agents in loose practices, but it can also lead to normative problems. Namely, on the one hand, social robots may cause loose social practices to become too rigid; on the other hand, they present us with the problem that we would have to recognize robots as co-authors of our social practices or even as persons.

We argue against the view that human behavior is the benchmark of robotic performance for every kind of social interaction. To the contrary, it is rather human agents who, in what we call ‘functional social interactions,’ aim at simulating social automatons. An important aspect of this simulation is the agent’s attempt to suppress every indication of the existence of a difference between what she experiences from the “‘I’-perspective” and what is perceived by other agents, the “‘me’-perspective”. Although experiencing this difference is not needed for realizing functional interaction it is, however, needed for what we call “close interhuman relationships”.