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Requirements for Artificial Companions
Abstract
What will it be like to admit Artificial Companions into our society? How will they change our relations with each other? How important will they be in the emotional and practical lives of their owners – since we know that people became emotionally dependent even on simple devices like the Tamagotchi? How much social life might they have in contacting each other? The contributors to this book discuss the possibility and desirability of some form of long-term computer Companions now being a certainty in the coming years. It is a good moment to consider, from a set of wide interdisciplinary perspectives, both how we shall construct them technically as well as their personal philosophical and social consequences. By Companions we mean conversationalists or confidants – not robots – but rather computer software agents whose function will be to get to know their owners over a long period. Those may well be elderly or lonely, and the contributions in the book focus not only on assistance via the internet (contacts, travel, doctors etc.) but also on providing company and Companionship, by offering aspects of real personalization.
Although social robots are achieving increasing prominence as companions and carers, their status as partners in an interactive relationship with humans remains unclear. The present paper explores this issue, first, by considering why social robots cannot truly qualify as “Thous”, that is, as surrogate human partners, as they are often assumed to be, and then by briefly considering why it will not do to construe them as mere machines, slaves, or pets, as others have contended. Having concluded that none of these familiar designations does justice to social robots’ still evolving and yet-to-be-defined status, I go on to consider whether engaging in a “relational turn” which prioritises the relationship over the entities in relation, can provide a more satisfactory alternative. In defending this stance, Damiano and Dumouchel (HUMANA.MENTE J Philos Stud 13:181–206, 2020) contend that in addition to foregrounding the possibility that social robots constitute new types of artificial companions which we can find “companionable in different ways”, the relational turn has the added advantage of providing a more expansive and productive ethical framework for future research and development in this domain. But on balance, it is far from clear that this approach can circumvent the so-called “dummy-human” problem, the contention that social robots are little more than sophisticated toys with the potential to deceive their users about the prospects for genuine partnership and bonding. Accordingly, I conclude that while Damiano and Dumouchel’s shift in “target phenomenology” brings to the fore facets of the interaction that may be difficult to infer by focussing on the relata alone, it is ultimately too “thin” to qualify as a template for robust human-robotic interaction of the sort that could qualify as a genuine partnership. Hence, while their relational turn has its merits in alerting us to the novel possibilities and challenges afforded by this ever-evolving technology and to the limitations of existing frameworks, it is contended that in itself it cannot provide an adequate template for conceptualising what a genuine human–robot partnership might entail. Instead, we need a more expansive approach that can do greater justice to the complexities of human-robotic interaction in its continuities as well as differences from more familiar human (and animal) prototypes.
Conversational robots and agents are being designed for educational and/or persuasive tasks, e.g., health or fitness coaching. To pursue such tasks over a long time, they will need a complex model of the strategic goal, a variety of strategies to implement it in interaction, and the capability of strategic talk. Strategic talk is incipient ongoing conversation in which at least one participant has the objective of changing the other participant’s attitudes or goals. The paper is based on the observation that strategic talk can stretch over considerable periods of time and a number of conversational segments. Film dialogues are taken as a source to develop a model of the strategic talk of mentor characters. A corpus of film mentor utterances is annotated on the basis of the model, and the data are interpreted to arrive at insights into mentor behavior, especially into the realization and sequencing of strategies.
An important aspect of human interaction is our ability to store, retain, recall and organise information. Memory assists in building rapport and gaining trust. The growing field of artificial companions involving long term and casual/social relationships will require appropriate handling of memories of the user by an Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA). This is a first study to determine what types of personal information (i.e. domain/task and casual/social) users expected an IVA to discuss and remember and how users responded to various levels of IVA recall and forgetting of that information: complete recall, total loss of recall, partial recall and incorrect recall. Our experiment collected conversations and survey responses from participants who interacted with a virtual real estate agent according to one of two treatments over three experimental sessions. No significant differences were found in participants’ responses between task-focused or casual/social content, however a larger sample size may produce different results and some participants were not comfortable with answering the social questions. Recall was found to increase the user′s enjoyment of interacting with the agent and also to increase the believability of the character over multiple interactions. We found that characters who recall information incorrectly are highly frustrating, are seen as having unnatural memory and this decreases the believability of the character. However, characters that exhibit forgetting, either explicitly stating their forgetfulness or not mentioning it at all, are seen to have a more natural memory and can help to increase the believability of the character. The study also suggests that forgetting affects the level of trust the user feels for the character.
The special issue of Applied Artificial Intelligence brings together results of and reflections on the research work undertaken in the project Social Engagement with Robots and Agents (SERA) during the years 2009 and 2010. The description of the setup and the field study is provided by the article, Describing the Interactive Domestic Robot Setup for the SERA Project. The article Theory of Companions: What Can Theoretical Models Contribute to Applications and Understanding of Human-Robot Interaction? begins, as did the project, with a review of social psychological theories of human-human relationships. The article, From Data to Design, addresses reflections on methodology in analyzing human-robot interaction from the engineers' perspective. It takes a critical look at qualitative methods of data analysis and proposes the narrative method as a path from episodic data to design. The final article, On the Nature of Engineering Social Artificial Companions, carries on the development perspective.
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