last update:20110721
More and more artefacts, robots or electronic media interface are
being designed whose function is to interact in social contexts.
These artificial creatures, either, physically present in three
dimensional space or existing only on a screen, are called upon to
play different roles in social interactions, for example, to provide
counsel, information, or entertainment (including of course sexual
services, which are envisaged for future generations of robots and
military uses, but access to information concerning these is limited
and difficult). The goal of these technological developments is to
replace human beings in certain social contexts, with artificial
creatures with which (with whom?) we can credibly exchange, gas ifh
they were human. We can refer to this broad technological endeavour as
gartificial empathyh and it has major social, ethical and
epistemological implications. Most of the proposed uses of these
artificial creatures are in the domain of health care and in service
industry in general, as counsellors, experts, or providers of
information in public places like train stations, museums, business or
administrations. The latter uses can be seen simply as designing more
user friendly computerised services, but in the medical and education
domains robots are destined to become gfriendsh and gcompanionsh
either in schools, in hospitals or in old folks homes, and sometimes
even as substitutes for more gintimate friends.h Does artificial
empathy constitute the future of gcareh?
Apart from the many difficult and interesting technical issues such an
enterprise entails, it also raises a number of important
philosophical, ethical and socio-political questions. It also presents
interesting challenges and questions in relation to the issue of
imitation which has been central in much of my past research. There
are at least three reasons for this. The first is that roboticists
realise that in order to make an artificial agent that can
appropriately interact with humans in an open context you cannot input
beforehand in the machine all the relevant social information. You
need to make a machine that can learn, and the central mechanism of
social learning, according to them, is imitation. In other words if
you want to create a human like artificial agent, create an agent that
can imitate. Furthermore, because we are dealing here with a community
of researchers who come from many different disciplines, cognitive
science, psychology, computer science, primatology, medicine,
neuroscience, philosophy, electrical engineering, etc. there is no
commonly shared preconceived idea about what is eimitationf. These
researchers are essentially interested in gwhat worksh.
This is related to the second reason. People who design and experiment
with such robots do not consider that they are doing applied science.
They view their artefacts and artificial agents as scientific
instruments, as ways of discovering, what is the nature of learning,
of imitation, or of social attachment. They do not see themselves so
much as creating new and better technology rather they construe their
enterprise as testing theories and discovering the nature of social
interactions. They are engaged in a process of discovery and think
that we will know what imitation is when we can make a robot that can
imitate, rather than they are trying to make a robot that applies this
or that theory of imitation.
There is a third, closely related reason why artificial empathy
research should interest those who reflect upon the issue of
imitation: imitation in artificial agent is essentially non-mentalist.
There is no mental state inside of a robotfs eheadf that
corresponds to imitation. Thus this is imitation without
representation in a radical sense. As Lola Canamero of the Feelix
Growing Project (
http://www.feelix-growing.org/) argues, the
important point is that capacities like imitation or emotions can
emerge directly from social interaction without their being inside the
robot any module or particular subsystem that is responsible for this
ehaviour. (Conference at Ritsumeikan School of Core Ethics and
Frontier Sciences, July 2008).
UP: 20110720@REV:20110721