57 research outputs found
A Failure of Imagination: How and Why People Respond Differently to Human and Computer Team-Mates
Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH
Seeing is Believing: Formalising False-Belief Tasks in Dynamic Epistemic Logic
Abstract. In this paper we show how to formalise false-belief tasks like the Sally-Anne task and the second-order chocolate task in Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL). False-belief tasks are used to test the strength of the Theory of Mind (ToM) of humans, that is, a human’s ability to attribute mental states to other agents. Having a ToM is known to be essential to human social intelligence, and hence likely to be essential to social intelligence of artificial agents as well. It is therefore important to find ways of implementing a ToM in artificial agents, and to show that such agents can then solve false-belief tasks. In this paper, the approach is to use DEL as a formal framework for representing ToM, and use reasoning in DEL to solve false-belief tasks. In addition to formalising several false-belief tasks in DEL, the paper introduces some extensions of DEL itself: edge-conditioned event models and observability propositions. These extensions are introduced to provide better formalisations of the false-belief tasks, but expected to have independent future interest.
Imitation and social learning for synthetic characters
Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 137-149).We want to build animated characters and robots capable of rich social interactions with humans and each other, and who are able to learn by observing those around them. An increasing amount of evidence suggests that, in human infants, the ability to learn by watching others, and in particular, the ability to imitate, could be crucial precursors to the development of appropriate social behavior, and ultimately the ability to reason about the thoughts, intents, beliefs, and desires of others. We have created a number of imitative characters and robots, the latest of which is Max T. Mouse, an anthropomorphic animated mouse character who is able to observe the actions he sees his friend Morris Mouse performing, and compare them to the actions he knows how to perform himself. This matching process allows Max to accurately imitate Morris's gestures and actions, even when provided with limited synthetic visual input. Furthermore, by using his own perception, motor, and action systems as models for the behavioral and perceptual capabilities of others (a process known as Simulation Theory in the cognitive literature), Max can begin to identify simple goals and motivations for Morris's behavior, an important step towards developing characters with a full theory of mind. Finally, Max can learn about unfamiliar objects in his environment, such as food and toys, by observing and correctly interpreting Morris's interactions with these objects, demonstrating his ability to take advantage of socially acquired information.by Daphna Buchsbaum.S.M
Producing Humans: An Anthropology of Social and Cognitive Robots
In this thesis, I ask how the human is produced in robotics research,
focussing specifically on the work that is done to create humanoid robots
that exhibit social and intelligent behaviour. Robots, like other technologies,
are often presented as the result of the systematic application of progressive
scientific knowledge over time, and thus emerging as inevitable, ahistorical,
and a-territorial entities. However, as we shall see, the robot’s existence as a
recognisable whole, as well as the various ways in which researchers
attempt to shape, animate and imbue it ‘human-like’ qualities, is in fact the
result of specific events, in specific geographical and cultural locations.
Through an ethnographic investigation of the sites in which robotics
research takes place, I describe and analyse how, in robotics research,
robotics researchers are reflecting, reproducing, producing, and sometimes
challenging, core assumptions about what it means to be human.
The dissertation draws on three and a half years of ethnographic
research across a number of robotics research laboratories and field sites in
Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States between April 2016 and
December 2019. It also includes an investigation of the sites where robotics
knowledge is disseminated and evaluated, such as conferences and field test
sites. Through a combination of participant and non-participant observation,
interviews, and textual analysis, I explore how the robot reveals
assumptions about the human, revealing both individual, localised
engineering cultures, as well as wider Euro-American imaginaries.
In this dissertation, I build on existing ethnographies of laboratory
work and technological production, which investigate scientific laboratories
as cultural sites. I also contribute to contemporary debates in anthropology
and posthumanist theory, which question the foundational assumptions of
humanism. While contemporary scholarship has attempted to move beyond
the nature/culture binary by articulating a multitude of reconfigurations and
boundary negotiations, I argue that this is done by neglecting the body.
In order to address this gap, I bring together two complementary
conceptual devices. First, I employ the embodiment philosophy of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (2012; 1968) particularly his emphasis on the body as a site
of knowing the world. Second, I use the core anthropological concept of the
‘fetish’ as elaborated by William Pietz (1985). By interrogating the robot as
‘fetish’, I elaborate how the robot is simultaneously a territorialised,
historicised, personalised, and reified object. This facilitates an exploration
of the disparate, and often contradictory nature, of the relations between
people and objects.
In my thesis, I find many boundary reconfigurations and dissolutions
between the human and the robot. However, deviating from the relational
ontology dominant in the anthropology of technology, I discover an
enduring asymmetry between the human and the robot, with the living body
emerging as a durable category that cannot be reasoned away. Thus, my
thesis questions how the existing literature might obscure important
questions about the category of the human by focusing disproportionately
on the blurring and/or blurred nature of human/non-human boundaries.
Ultimately, I argue for a collaborative and emergent configuration of the
human, and its relationship with the world, that is at once both relational
and embodied.
This dissertation is structured as follows. An initial introductory
chapter is followed by a chapter documenting the literature review and
conceptual framework. This is followed by four chapters that correspond to
the four aspects of the fetish in Pietz’s model: Historicisation,
Territorialisation, Reification and Personalisation. These chapters alternate
between scholarly sources and ethnographic data. In Historicisation, using
existing scholarship, I trace the history of the robot object, including the
continuities and discontinuities that led to its creation, as well as the futures
that are implicated in its identity. This is followed by the Territorialisation
chapter, in which ethnographic data is used to interrogate the robot’s
materiality, as well as the spaces in which it is built, modified, and tested.
The next chapter, Reification, considers the robot as a valuable object
according to institutions and the productive and ideological systems of
Euro-American imaginaries. This chapter integrates ethnographic detail
with existing scholarship to focus on contrasts between the dominant image
of imminent super-human intelligence and the human interventions and
social relationships necessary to produce the illusion of robot autonomy.
Finally, the chapter Personalisation brings ethnographic attention to the
intensely personal way that the robot-as-fetish is experienced in an
encounter with an embodied person, understood through the lens of
Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment philosophy. In the final chapter, I draw
together the various strands to articulate how understanding the robot as a
fetish, underscored by Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment phenomenology, can
provide useful resources for developing an alternative understanding of the
human in anthropology without dissolving it all together
Shared information structure: Evidence from cross-linguistic priming
This study asked whether bilinguals construct a language-independent level of information structure for the sentences that they produce. It reports an experiment in which a Polish–English bilingual and a confederate of the experimenter took turns to describe pictures to each other and to find those pictures in an array. The confederate produced a Polish active, passive, or conjoined noun phrase, or an active sentence with object–verb–subject order (OVS sentence). The participant responded in English, and tended to produce a passive sentence more often after a passive or an OVS sentence than after a conjoined noun phrase or active sentence. Passives and OVS sentences are syntactically unrelated but share information structure, in that both assign emphasis to the patient. We therefore argued that bilinguals construct a language-independent level of information structure during speech
Conversations on Empathy
In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" – others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice
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