Humanization of robots: is it really such a good idea?

The aim of this review was to examine the pros and cons of humanizing social robots following a psychological perspective. As such, we had six goals. First, we defined what social robots are. Second, we clarified the meaning of humanizing social robots. Third, we presented the theoretical backgrounds for promoting humanization. Fourth, we conducted a review of empirical results of the positive effects and the negative effects of humanization on human–robot interaction (HRI). Fifth, we presented some of the political and ethical problems raised by the humanization of social robots. Lastly, we discussed the overall effects of the humanization of robots in HRI and suggested new avenues of research and development.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Robotics in Germany and Japan

This book comprehends an intercultural and interdisciplinary framework including current research fields like Roboethics, Hermeneutics of Technologies, Technology Assessment, Robotics in Japanese Popular Culture and Music Robots. Contributions on cultural interrelations, technical visions and essays are rounding out the content of this book

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume. Volume 2

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 2

New materialism and gender - (re) configuring human and robotic embodiment

Dissertation (MA (Digital Culture and Media))--University of Pretoria, 2022.Dominant understandings of sex, gender and sexuality align with patriarchal ideology that maintains misogyny, sexism and male supremacy. A critical feature of the aforementioned gender paradigm is strict mutually exclusive binarism and essentialism. By taking a queer feminist perspective on gender (and the gender binary) and using posthuman new materialism (agential realism) as a theoretical framework this study engages with the constitution of myriad binaries, including the male/female, man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual, sex/gender, human/nonhuman and mind/body binaries. Through a diffractive reading of feminist poststructuralist, new materialist, biological, ethnographical and queer theories of sexual difference, sex, gender and sexuality and the binary genderisation of anthropomorphised social technologies – including intelligent assistants and companion and humanoid robotics – the iterative constitution of sex, gender, sexuality, body and human is explored revealing various apparatuses that material-discursively (de)stabilise these binaries. Thinking of gender, the body and the human as dynamic contingent phenomena and taking a non-anthropocentric stance allows a reconsideration of both robotic and human embodiment. Paramount here is the dual possibilities of creating more of the same, reinscribing normative realities or leaving open the potential for the co- creation of dynamic futures.Visual ArtsMA (Digital Culture and Media)Unrestricte

Designing companions, designing tools : social robots, developers, and the elderly in Japan

Ce mémoire de maîtrise trace la généalogie d’un robot social, de sa conception à ses différentes utilisations et la manière dont les utilisateurs interagissent avec. A partir d’un terrain de six mois dans une start-up et deux maisons de retraite au Japon, j’interroge la création de Pepper, un robot social crée par la compagnie japonais SoftBank. Pepper a été créé de façon à être humanoïde mais pas trop, ainsi que perçu comme adorable et charmant. Par la suite, je décris comment Pepper et d’autres robots sociaux sont utilisés, à la fois par des développeurs, mais aussi par des personnes âgées, et je souligne une tension existante entre leur utilisation comme des compagnons et des outils. En me basant sur l’anthropologie ontologique et la phénoménologie, j’examine la construction du robot comme une entité avec laquelle il est possible d’interagir, notamment à cause de sa conception en tant qu’acteur social, ontologiquement ambigu, et qui peut exprimer de l’affect. En m’intéressant aux interactions multimodales, et en particulier le toucher, je classifie trois fonctions remplies par l’interaction : découverte, contrôle, et l’expression de l’affect. Par la suite, je questionne ces actes d’agir vers et s’ils peuvent être compris comme une interaction, puisqu’ils n’impliquent pas que le robot soit engagé. J’argumente qu’une interaction est un échange de sens entre des agents engagés et incarnés. Il y a effectivement parfois un échange de sens entre le robot et son utilisateur, et le robot est un artefact incarné. Cependant, seule l’impression d’intersubjectivité est nécessaire à l’interaction, plutôt que sa réelle présence.This master’s thesis traces a genealogy of a social robot through its conception to its various uses and the ways users interact with it. Drawing on six months of fieldwork in a start-up and two nursing homes in Japan, I first investigate the genesis of a social robot created by SoftBank, a Japanese multinational telecommunications company. This social robot is quite humanlike, made to be cute and have an adorable personality. While developers constitute one of the user populations, this robot, along with several others, is also used by elderly residents in nursing homes. By analyzing the uses of these populations, I underline the tension between the social robot as a companion and a tool. Drawing on ontological anthropology and phenomenology I look at how the robot is constructed as an entity that can be interacted with, through its conception as an ontologically ambiguous, social actor, that can express affect. Looking at multimodal interaction, and especially touch, I then classify three functions they fulfill: discovery, control, and the expression of affect, before questioning whether this acting towards the robot that does not imply acting from the robot, can be considered a form of interaction. I argue that interaction is the exchange of meaning between embodied, engaged participants. Meaning can be exchanged between robots and humans and the robot can be seen as embodied, but only the appearance of intersubjectivity is enough, rather than its actual presence

Actor & Avatar: A Scientific and Artistic Catalog

What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of "technical others" and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material

Critical Techno-dramaturgy: Mobilizing Embodied Perception in Intermedial Performance

This dissertation attends to the ways in which the deployment of technological devices in twenty-first-century intermedial performance might influence the audience members’ perception of the relationship between humans and technology. Drawing upon the work of scholars in the fields of new media, performance studies, and the philosophy of technology, I argue that intermedial performance artists reinvigorate the role of the human body in performance by mobilizing embodiment as a techno-dramaturgical strategy for shaping the audience members’ perception of human-machine interaction. Chapter One surveys the history of performance and technology from the ancient Greek theatre to twentieth-century performance, with particular emphasis on the conceptual significance of techne and poiesis in dramatic theatre. Chapter Two examines the theories of intermediality in performance as well as the co-evolutionary relationship between human beings and technicity in order to delineate the analytical and dramaturgical potential of an original conceptual framework known as critical techno-dramaturgy. Chapter Three explores the interplay between embodiment, technology, and space in intermedial performance and its effects on the audience members’ awareness of their embodied existence as they navigate the cityscape with bicycles, handheld computers, and mobile phones. Chapter Four investigates the intersection of performance and techno-anxiety by looking at how intelligent machines that appear to perform autonomously might affect the audience members’ perception of these anthropomorphic technological agents in relation to their own bodies. Chapter Five examines how the construction of the “cyborg” as both a conceptual metaphor for and a material instantiation of human-machine “fusion” could impact the prosthetic relations between persons with disabilities and the technological devices that they employ in intermedial performance. Finally, Chapter Six looks at my involvement in the production of an original creative project that uses critical techno-dramaturgy as a strategy for shaping the audience members’ perception of the complicity between digital media (particularly video technology) and the mediation of death

The Silicone Self: An Ethnography of the Love and Sex Doll Community

This dissertation is an empirically grounded study of the love and sex doll community. Conducted over 14 months of digital ethnographic research, this dissertation draws from participant observation, in-depth interviews, content analysis, and mixed methods to analyze the interactional dynamics of love and sex doll owners in digital spaces. Drawing from the sociology of sexualities, deviance, symbolic interactionism, and new media, this dissertation examines how technology can become a central part of people’s sexual lives. The concept of the silicone self is put forth as a way of understanding how people become socialized into doll ownership as a collective group. The silicone self is employed in three situations. First, the self-ing process whereby people reflect on their previous sexual and romantic experiences before deciding to become a sex doll owner. This reflexive process reveals shifting ideas about the centrality of marriage for heterosexual men in contemporary society. Second, the silicone self is employed to show how sex doll ownership requires material considerations specific to this sex practice. Because sex dolls are relatively rare objects, interested owners must learn from one another how to use their dolls properly. Investment in the community is shown to refract into other interest, such as erotica photography. Finally, the silicone self is used to explore the role of play and personification. Sex dolls are unlike other sex toys because they approximate an entire, rather than partial, human. As such, sex doll owners imagine their dolls as having personality traits which they animate via social media and other creative faculties. These experiences are theorized to provide outlets for heterosexual men to escape the strictures of heteronormative masculinity. The dissertation concludes by way of critically interrogating a central tension in the human-robot interaction—whether sex dolls are just sex toys or represent something more. Implications for generating a social, rather than technologically deterministic, theory of futuristic sex toys are discussed

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume 5. Gender and Human-Machine Communication

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume