You, robot: on the linguistic construction of artificial others
How can we make sense of the idea of personal or social relations with robots? Starting from a social and phenomenological approach to humanrobot relations, this paper explores how we can better understand and evaluate these relations by attending to the ways our conscious experience of the robot and the humanrobot relation is mediated by language. It is argued that our talk about and to robots is not a mere representation of an objective robotic or social-interactive reality, but rather interprets and co-shapes our relation to these artificial quasi-others. Our use of language also changes as a result of our experiences and practices. This happens when people start talking to robots. In addition, this paper responds to the ethical objection that talking to and with robots is both unreal and deceptive. It is concluded that in order to give meaning to humanrobot relations, to arrive at a more balanced ethical judgment, and to reflect on our current form of life, we should complement existing objective-scientific methodologies of social robotics and interaction studies with interpretations of the words, conversations, and stories in and about humanrobot relations.
phenomenology humanrobot relations language robot ethics hermeneutics