In Exploring Robotic Minds: Actions, Symbols, and Consciousness as Self-Organizing Dynamic Phenomena, Jun Tani sets out to answer an essential and tantalizing question: How do our minds work? By providing an overview of his "synthetic neurorobotics" project, Tani reveals how symbols and concepts that represent the world can emerge in a neurodynamic structure--iterative interactions between the top-down subjective view, which proactively acts on the world, and the bottom-up recognition of the resultant perceptual reality. He argues that nontrivial problems of consciousness (...) and free will could be addressed through structural understanding of such iterative, conflicting interactions between the top-down and the bottom-up pathways. A wide range of readers will enjoy this wonderful journey of the mind and will follow the author on interdisciplinary discussions that span neuroscience, dynamical systems theories, robotics, and phenomenology. The book also includes many figures, as well as a link to videos of Tani's exciting robotic experiments. (shrink)

The view that phenomenally conscious robots are on the horizon often rests on a certain philosophical view about consciousness, one we call “nomological behaviorism.” The view entails that, as a matter of nomological necessity, if a robot had exactly the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as a phenomenally conscious being, then the robot would be phenomenally conscious; indeed it would have all and only the states of phenomenal consciousness that the phenomenally conscious being in question has. (...) We experimentally investigate whether the folk think that certain (hypothetical) robots made of silicon and steel would have the same conscious states as certain familiar biological beings with the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as the robots. Our findings provide evidence that the folk largely reject the view that silicon-based robots would have the sensations that they, the folk, attribute to the biological beings in question. (shrink)

Serious attempts to build thinking machines began after the second world war. One line of research, called Cybernetics, used electronic circuitry imitating nervous systems to make machines that learned to recognize simple patterns, and turtle-like robots that found their way to recharging plugs. A different approach, named Artificial Intelligence, harnessed the arithmetic power of post-war computers to abstract reasoning, and by the 1960s made computers prove theorems in logic and geometry, solve calculus problems and play good games of checkers. At (...) the end of the 1960s, research groups at MIT and Stanford attached television cameras and robot arms to their computers, so "thinking" programs could begin to collect information directly from the real world. (shrink)

Building artificial moral agents (AMAs) underscores the fragmentary character of presently available models of human ethical behavior. It is a distinctly different enterprise from either the attempt by moral philosophers to illuminate the “ought” of ethics or the research by cognitive scientists directed at revealing the mechanisms that influence moral psychology, and yet it draws on both. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have tended to stress the importance of particular cognitive mechanisms, e.g., reasoning, moral sentiments, heuristics, intuitions, or a moral grammar, (...) in the making of moral decisions. However, assembling a system from the bottom-up which is capable of accommodating moral considerations draws attention to the importance of a much wider array of mechanisms in honing moral intelligence. Moral machines need not emulate human cognitive faculties in order to function satisfactorily in responding to morally significant situations. But working through methods for building AMAs will have a profound effect in deepening an appreciation for the many mechanisms that contribute to a moral acumen, and the manner in which these mechanisms work together. Building AMAs highlights the need for a comprehensive model of how humans arrive at satisfactory moral judgments. (shrink)

The best reason for believing that robots might some day become conscious is that we human beings are conscious, and we are a sort of robot ourselves. That is, we are extraordinarily complex self-controlling, self-sustaining physical mechanisms, designed over the eons by natural selection, and operating according to the same well-understood principles that govern all the other physical processes in living things: digestive and metabolic processes, self-repair and reproductive processes, for instance. It may be wildly over-ambitious to suppose that (...) human artificers can repeat Nature's triumph, with variations in material, form, and design process, but this is not a deep objection. It is not as if a conscious machine contradicted any fundamental laws of nature, the way a perpetual motion machine does. Still, many skeptics believe--or in any event want to believe--that it will never be done. I wouldn't wager against them, but my reasons for skepticism are mundane, economic reasons, not theoretical reasons. (shrink)

The uncanny valley—the unnerving nature of humanlike robots—is an intriguing idea, but both its existence and its underlying cause are debated. We propose that humanlike robots are not only unnerving, but are so because their appearance prompts attributions of mind. In particular, we suggest that machines become unnerving when people ascribe to them experience, rather than agency. Experiment 1 examined whether a machine’s humanlike appearance prompts both ascriptions of experience and feelings of unease. Experiment 2 tested whether a machine (...) capable of experience remains unnerving, even without a humanlike appearance. Experiment 3 investigated whether the perceived lack of experience can also help explain the creepiness of unfeeling humans and philosophical zombies. These experiments demonstrate that feelings of uncanniness are tied to perceptions of experience, and also suggest that experience—but not agency—is seen as fundamental to humans, and fundamentally lacking in machines. (shrink)

A suitable project for the new Millenium is to radically reconfigure our image of human rationality. Such a project is already underway, within the Cognitive Sciences, under the umbrellas of work in Situated Cognition, Distributed and De-centralized Cogition, Real-world Robotics and Artificial Life1. Such approaches, however, are often criticized for giving certain aspects of rationality too wide a berth. They focus their attention on on such superficially poor cousins as.

While robots were traditionally built to achieve economic efficiency and financial profits, their roles are likely to change in the future with the aim to provide social support and companionship. In this research, we examined whether the robot’s proposed function (social vs. economic) impacts judgments of mind and moral treatment. Studies 1a and 1b demonstrated that robots with social function were perceived to possess greater ability for emotional experience, but not cognition, compared to those with economic function and (...) whose function was not mentioned explicitly. Study 2 replicated this finding and further showed that low economic value reduced ascriptions of cognitive capacity, whereas high social value resulted in increased emotion perception. In Study 3, robots with high social value were more likely to be afforded protection from harm, and such effect was related to levels of ascribed emotional experience. Together, the findings demonstrate a dissociation between function type (social vs. economic) and ascribed mind (emotion vs. cognition). In addition, the two types of functions exert asymmetric influences on the moral treatment of robots. Theoretical and practical implications for the field of social psychology and human-computer interaction are discussed. (shrink)

Machines will attain human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, predicts robotics expert Hans Moravec. And by 2050, they will have far surpassed us. In this mind-bending new book, Hans Moravec takes the reader on a roller coaster ride packed with such startling predictions. He tells us, for instance, that in the not-too-distant future, an army of robots will displace workers, causing massive, unprecedented unemployment. But then, says Moravec, a period of very comfortable existence will follow, as humans (...) benefit from a fully automated economy. And eventually, as machines evolve far beyond humanity, robots will supplant us. But if Moravec predicts the end of the domination by human beings, his is not a bleak vision. Far from railing against a future in which machines rule the world, Moravec embraces it, taking the startling view that intelligent robots will actually be our evolutionary heirs. "Intelligent machines, which will grow from us, learn our skills, and share our goals and values, can be viewed as children of our minds." And since they are our children, we will want them to outdistance us. In fact, in a bid for immortality, many of our descendants will choose to transform into "ex humans," as they upload themselves into advanced computers. We will become our children and live forever. In his provocative new book, the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestselling volume Mind Children, Moravec charts the trajectory of robotics in breathtaking detail. A must read for artificial intelligence, technology, and computer enthusiasts, Moravec's freewheeling but informed speculations present a future far different than we ever dared imagine. (shrink)

The task of this essay is to respond to the question concerning robots and responsibility—to answer for the way that we understand, debate, and decide who or what is able to answer for decisions and actions undertaken by increasingly interactive, autonomous, and sociable mechanisms. The analysis proceeds through three steps or movements. It begins by critically examining the instrumental theory of technology, which determines the way one typically deals with and responds to the question of responsibility when it involves technology. (...) It then considers three instances where recent innovations in robotics challenge this standard operating procedure by opening gaps in the usual way of assigning responsibility. The innovations considered in this section include: autonomous technology, machine learning, and social robots. The essay concludes by evaluating the three different responses—instrumentalism 2.0, machine ethics, and hybrid responsibility—that have been made in face of these difficulties in an effort to map out the opportunities and challenges of and for responsible robotics. (shrink)

Do animals have thoughts and feelings? Could robots have minds like our own? Can we ever know, or will the answer be forever out of our reach? David McFarland explores the answers to these questions, drawing not only on the philosophy of mind, but also on developments in artificial intelligence, robots, and the science of animal behaviour.

Do animals have thoughts and feelings? Could robots have minds like our own? Can we ever know, or will the answer be forever out of our reach? David McFarland explores the answers to these questions, drawing not only on the philosophy of mind, but also on developments in artificial intelligence, robots, and the science of animal behaviour.

In this chapter, I use the expression “robotic animism” to refer to the tendency that many people have to interact with robots as if the robots have minds or a personality. I compare the idea of robotic animism with what philosophers and psychologists sometimes refer to as “mind-reading”, as it relates to human interaction with robots. The chapter offers various examples of robotic animism and mind-reading within different forms of human-robot interaction, and it also considers ethical and (...) prudential arguments for and against attributing minds and a personality to robots. In the last section of the chapter, I also consider the intriguing question of whether any robots that exist today could be said to have some sort of minds in some non-trivial sense. (shrink)

Discusses the problems that surround the developing science of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This title introduces and clarifies the basic concepts for understanding these problems and also discusses opposing views and possible solutions. It describes the kinds of research that seem to improve our understanding of the mechanisms of intelligence.

It has been proposed that the design of robots might benefit from interactions that are similar to caregiver-child interactions, which is tailored to children's respective capacities to a high degree. However, so far little is known about how people adapt their tutoring behaviour to robots and whether robots can evoke input that is similar to child-directed interaction. The paper presents detailed analyses of speakers' linguistic behaviour and non-linguistic behaviour, such as action demonstration, in two comparable situations: In one experiment, parents (...) described and explained to their nonverbal infants the use of certain everyday objects; in the other experiment, participants tutored a simulated robot on the same objects. The results, which show considerable differences between the two situations on almost all measures, are discussed in the light of the computer-as-social-actor paradigm and the register hypothesis. Keywords: child-directed speech (CDS); motherese; robotese; motionese; register theory; social communication; human-robot interaction (HRI); computers-as-social-actors; mindless transfer. (shrink)

It has been proposed that the design of robots might benefit from interactions that are similar to caregiver–child interactions, which is tailored to children’s respective capacities to a high degree. However, so far little is known about how people adapt their tutoring behaviour to robots and whether robots can evoke input that is similar to child-directed interaction. The paper presents detailed analyses of speakers’ linguistic behaviour and non-linguistic behaviour, such as action demonstration, in two comparable situations: In one experiment, parents (...) described and explained to their nonverbal infants the use of certain everyday objects; in the other experiment, participants tutored a simulated robot on the same objects. The results, which show considerable differences between the two situations on almost all measures, are discussed in the light of the computer-as-social-actor paradigm and the register hypothesis. Keywords: child-directed speech ; motherese; robotese; motionese; register theory; social communication; human–robot interaction ; computers-as-social-actors; mindless transfer. (shrink)

In this chapter, I consider two hypotheses that have informed recent work in experimental philosophy of mind. The first is a positive hypothesis put forward by Fiala, Arico, and Nichols : Categorization of an entity as an agent through fast, automatic, and domain-specific processing produces a disposition to ascribe a wide range of mental states to that entity. The second is a negative hypothesis put forward by Sytsma and Machery: The existence of phenomenally conscious mental states is not obvious (...) from first-person experience with states like seeing red and feeling pain. I argue that these hypotheses are not necessary at odds. Despite this, empirical results reported by Sytsma and Machery raise concerns for FAN's hypothesis, while results reported by FAN in response raise concerns for our hypothesis. I address these concerns in this essay, presenting the results of four new studies that support our negative hypothesis against FAN's challenge. (shrink)

Our first tools, sticks and stones, were very different from ourselves. But many tools now resemble us, in function or form, and they are beginning to have minds. A loose parallel with our own evolution suggests how they may develop in future. Computerless industrial machinery exhibits the behavioral flexibility of single-celled organisms. Today's best computer-controlled robots are like the simpler invertebrates. A thousand-fold increase in computer power in this decade should make possible machines with reptile-like sensory and motor competence. Growing (...) computer power over the next half century will allow robots that learn like mammals, model their world like primates and eventually reason like humans. Depending on your point of view, humanity will then have produced a worthy successor, or transcended inherited limitations and transformed itself into something quite new. No longer limited by the slow pace of human learning and even slower biological evolution, intelligent machinery will conduct its affairs on an ever faster, ever smaller scale, until coarse physical nature has been converted to fine-grained purposeful thought. (shrink)

Machines have always been a tool or technical instrument for human beings to facilitate and to accelerate processes through mechanical power. The same applies to robots nowadays – the next step in the evolution of machines. Over the course of the last few years, robot usage in society has expanded enormously, and they now carry out a remarkable number of tasks for us. It seems we are on the eve of a historic revolution that will change everything we know (...) right now. But not only robots have an impact on our life. It is digitization in its entirety, including smart applications and games, that confronts us with new spaces. This special volume of Ethics in Progress tries to broaden our understanding of a philosophical field – robots and digitization – that is still in its infancy in terms of it research and literature. (shrink)

Could robots be genuinely intelligent? Could they be conscious? Could there be zombies? Prompted by these questions Robert Kirk introduces the main problems of consciousness and sets out a new approach to solving them. He starts by discussing behaviourism, Turing's test of intelligence and Searle's famous Chinese Room argument, and goes on to examine dualism – the idea that consciousness requires something beyond the physical – together with its opposite, physicalism. Probing the idea of zombies, he concludes they are logically (...) impossible. Having presented the central problems, he sketches his solution: a version of functionalism, according to which consciousness consists in the performance of functions. While there is wide agreement among philosophers about what the main problems of consciousness are, there is little agreement on how to go about solving them. With this powerful case for his version of functionalism, Kirk offers an engaging introduction to both the problems and a possible solution. (shrink)

Introduces the use of Lego Robots for use in research and teaching in philosophy. Potential uses include using the machines as pedagogical tools for teaching introductory ideas in cognitive robotics, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. Describes the strength and potential pitfalls of introducing this technology to the classroom.

While it is primarily a detailed, technical treatise on the principles of the technology of automata, this book does contain some philosophically interesting material. In Part II, devoted to the theoretical construction of robots with consciousness but which exhibit no behavior, Culbertson advances and develops the idea that we can analyze perceptual consciousness in terms of the four dimensional "world-lines" of the transmissions of impulses along neurons, or rather in terms of interconnecting networks of such world lines. In Part III, (...) he argues that consciousness, defined in physical terms, cannot cause behavior. He presents, as an alternative, a doctrine of "historical causation" in which whole extended time periods in the past affect the present—K. P. F. (shrink)

What starts out as a run-of-the-mill denunciation of mechanism and behaviorism in the physical and social sciences ends up with some exciting, if sketchy, suggestions for new conceptions of man and his world. The key words for Bertalanffy's psychology are symbolism and system. The former delimits what is uniquely human in human behavior; the latter replaces man as stimulus-response robot with man as "active personality system." After discussing the advantages and drawbacks of man's propensity for the symbolic construction of (...) reality, the author turns his attention to the systems approach to an understanding of man. He warns against the common error of identifying cybernetics with general systems theory. The cybernated system, he feels, is still basically mechanistic, distinguishing itself only by the addition of a feed-back loop to make it self-regulative. It is still closed with respect to the introduction of matter or energy from outside the system, even though it is open to the introduction of information from outside. That is, no matter how complex the cybernetic system, it "can always be resolved into feedback circuits" and thought of in terms of "linear causality." The regulative behavior of general systems, on the other hand, is determined by goal-directed, dynamic interaction between many forces and variables in an open system. Bertalanffy points out that "no comprehensive theory of systems exists today." However, as a model the approach has many advantages, such as obviating the need for the "ghost in the machine" and suggesting some solutions to the mind-body problem. The book, originally the Heinz Werner Lectures at Clark University, is a provocative introduction to systems theory, and the bibliography is especially useful in suggesting further steps in the exploration of this exciting idea.--S. O. H. (shrink)

Clark and Fischer's dismissal of extant human–robot interaction research approaches limits opportunities to understand major variables shaping people's engagement with social robots. Instead, this endeavour categorically requires multidisciplinary approaches. We refute the assumption that people cannot (correctly or incorrectly) represent robots as autonomous social agents. This contradicts available empirical evidence, and will become increasingly tenuous as robot automation improves.

Robots are increasingly envisaged as our future cohabitants. However, while considerable progress has been made in recent years in terms of their technological realization, the ability of robots to inter-act with humans in an intuitive and social way is still quite limited. An important challenge for social robotics is to determine how to design robots that can perceive the user’s needs, feelings, and intentions, and adapt to users over a broad range of cognitive abilities. It is conceivable that if robots (...) were able to adequately demonstrate this, humans would eventually accept them as social companions. We argue that the best way to achieve this is using a systematic experimental approach based on behavioral and physiological neuroscience methods such as motion/eye tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), or functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) embedded in interactive human-robot paradigms. This approach requires understanding how humans interact with each other, how they perform tasks together and how they develop feelings of social connection over time, and using these insights to formulate design principles that make social robots attuned to the workings of the human brain. In this review, we put forward the argument that the likelihood of artificial agents being perceived as social companions can be increased by designing them in a way that they are perceived as intentional agents that activate areas in the human brain involved in social-cognitive processing. We first review literature related to social-cognitive mechanisms involved in human-human interactions, and high-light the importance of perceiving others as intentional agents to activate these brain areas. We then discuss how attribution of intentionality can positively affect human-robot interaction by (a) fostering feelings of social connection, empathy and prosociality, and by (b) enhancing performance on joint human-robot tasks. Lastly, we describe circumstances under which attribution of intentionality to robot agents might be disadvantageous, and discuss challenges associated with designing social robots that are inspired by neuroscientific principles. (shrink)

The robotics industry is growing rapidly, and to a large extent the development of this market sector is due to the area of social robotics – the production of robots that are designed to enter the space of human social interaction, both physically and semantically. Since social robots present a new type of social agent, they have been aptly classified as a disruptive technology, i.e. the sort of technology which affects the core of our current social practices and might lead (...) to profound cultural and social change. -/- Due to its disruptive and innovative potential, social robotics raises not only questions about utility, ethics, and legal aspects, but calls for “robo-philosophy” – the comprehensive philosophical reflection from the perspectives of all philosophical disciplines. This book presents the proceedings of the first conference in this new area, “Robo-Philosophy 2014 – Sociable Robots and the Future of Social Relations", held in Aarhus, Denmark, in August 2014. The short papers and abstracts collected here address questions of social robotics from the perspectives of philosophy of mind, social ontology, ethics, meta-ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, intercultural philosophy, and metaphilosophy. -/- Social robotics is still in its early stages, but it is precisely now that we need to reflect its possible cultural repercussions. This book is accessible to a wide readership and will be of interest to everyone involved in the development and use of social robotics applications, from social roboticists to policy makers. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider Hilary Putnam’s argument for the prima facie acceptance of robotic consciousness as deserving the status of mind. I argue that such an extension of consciousness renders the category fundamentally unintelligible, and we should instead understand robots as integral products of an extended human consciousness. To this end, I propose a test from conceptual object permanence, which can be applied not just to robots, but to the innumerable artifacts of consciousness that texture our existences.

Social robots are an increasingly integral part of society, already appearing as customer service assistants, care-home helpers, teaching assistants and personal companions. This book argues that the wider inclusion of social robots in our society is having a revolutionary impact on some of our key intuitions regarding ethics, metaphysics and epistemology and, as such, will put pressure on many of our best theories. Social robots elicit an emotional and social response in humans that some have taken to be evidence that (...) robots deserve moral consideration. Others have argued that, as robots are only machines, we should avoid designing robots that encourage emotional engagement. The fictional dualism model provides a new way for us to view social robots and a new route for our continued relationship with them. When we engage with a social robot, we create a fictional overlay that has wants, needs and desires. Our emotional attachment to social robots is a natural continuation of our relationship to fiction: a life-enhancing and important connection, but not one that prompts moral consideration for the fictional entity. In this book, Paula Sweeney shows how the fictional dualism model of social robots differs from other popular models. In addition to providing a distinctive and ethically appropriate framework for emotional engagement without moral consideration, the model provides conditions for trusting social robots and, uniquely, allows us to individuate social robots as distinct persons, even in contexts in which they share a collective mind. (shrink)

To advance the task of designing robots capable of performing collective tasks with humans, studies in human–robot interaction often turn to psychology, philosophy of mind and neuroscience for inspiration. In the same vein, this chapter explores how the notion of recognition and commitment can help confront some of the current problems in addressing robot-human interaction in joint tasks. First, we argue that joint actions require mutual recognition, which cannot be established without the attribution and maintenance of commitments. (...) Second, we argue that commitments require affective states such as social motivations or shared emotions. Finally, we conclude by assessing three possible proposals for how social robotics could implement an architecture of commitments by taking such an affective components into consideration. (shrink)

Social robots are robots that can interact socially with humans. As social robots and the artificial intelligence that powers them becomes more advanced, they will likely take on more social and work roles. This has many important ethical implications. In this paper, we focus on one of the most central of these, the impacts that social robots can have on human autonomy. We argue that, due to their physical presence and social capacities, there is a strong potential for social robots (...) to enhance human autonomy as well as several ways they can inhibit and disrespect it. We argue that social robots could improve human autonomy by helping us to achieve more valuable ends, make more authentic choices, and improve our autonomy competencies. We also argue that social robots have the potential to harm human autonomy by instead leading us to achieve fewer valuable ends ourselves, make less authentic choices, decrease our autonomy competencies, make our autonomy more vulnerable, and disrespect our autonomy. Whether the impacts of social robots on human autonomy are positive or negative overall will depend on the design, regulation, and use we make of social robots in the future. (shrink)

Putting robots on the battlefield is clearly appealing for policymakers. Why risk human lives, when robots could take our place, and do the dirty work of killing and dying for us? Against this, I argue that robots will be unable to win the kind of wars that we are increasingly drawn into. Modern warfare tends towards asymmetric conflict. Asymmetric warfare cannot be won without gaining the trust of the civilian population; this is ‘the hearts and minds’, in the hackneyed phrase (...) from counter-insurgency manuals. I claim that the very feature which makes it attractive to send robots to war in our place, the absence of risk, also makes it peculiarly difficult for humans to trust them. Whatever the attractions, sending robots to war in our stead will make success in counter-insurgency elusive. Moreover, there is ethical reason to be relieved at this conclusion. For if war is potentially costly, then this does much to ensure that it will be a choice only of last resort, in accordance with the traditional doctrine of jus ad bellum. In this instance, morality and expediency— fortunately— coincide. (shrink)

In this paper, we theoretically address the relevance of unintentional and inconsistent interactional elements in human–robot interactions. We argue that elements failing, or poorly succeeding, to reproduce a humanlike interaction create significant consequences in human–robot relational patterns and may affect human–human relations. When considering social interactions as systems, the absence of a precise interactional element produces a general reshaping of the interactional pattern, eventually generating new types of interactional settings. As an instance of this dynamic, we study the (...) absence of metacommunicative abilities in social artifacts. Then, we analyze the pragmatic consequences of the aforementioned absence through the lens of Paul Watzlawick’s interactionist theory. We suggest that a fixed complementary interactional setting may be produced because of the asymmetric understanding, between robots and humans, of metacommunication. We highlight the psychological implications of this interactional asymmetry within Jessica Benjamin’s concept of “mutual recognition”. Finally, we point out the possible shift of dysfunctional interactional patterns from human–robot interactions to human–human ones. (shrink)

In AI, consciousness of self consists in a program having certain kinds of facts about its own mental processes and state of mind. We discuss what consciousness of its own mental structures a robot will need in order to operate in the common sense world and accomplish the tasks humans will give it. It's quite a lot. Many features of human consciousness will be wanted, some will not, and some abilities not possessed by humans have already been found (...) feasible and useful in limited contexts. We give preliminary fragments of a logical language a robot can use to represent information about its own state of mind. A robot will often have to conclude that it cannot decide a question on the basis of the information in memory and therefore must seek information externally. Gödel's idea of relative consistency is used to formalize non-knowledge. Programs with the kind of consciousness discussed in this article do not yet exist, although programs with some components of it exist. Thinking about consciousness with a view to designing it provides a new approach to some of the problems of consciousness studied by philosophers. One advantage is that it focusses on the aspects of consciousness important for intelligent behavior. (shrink)