This book explores the co-existence of humans and AI in business contexts. Though AI and social robots have become ubiquitous, there are still many challenges facing technological expansion, including a true understanding of abstract concepts, transfer of knowledge to novel application problems, transparency and security guarantees, and distinguishing between random and logically meaningful relationships. While machines are valuable tools, only humans are capable of recognizing values which are the key to ethics and socio-cultural norms. Further, human virtues such as emotional intelligence, wisdom, and courage are required for decision making in many (private and professional) situations where machines would lead to sub-optimal and/or ethically questionable business outcomes. This book discusses how digital technology has emerged as a critical support system for organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic and how it can be used to complement human qualities that machines lack. It is divided into three sections that examine the complex world of AI and social robotics, digital technology and social media roles in business, and human actions that are embedded within socio-cultural business norms, such as international negotiations, that are not yet replaceable by AI. For researchers interested in understanding these parallel worlds, this book assesses how can continue to not only coexist but mutually benefit the business ecosystem.

Social robotics drives a technological revolution of possibly unprecedented disruptive potential, both at the socio-economic and the socio-cultural level. The rapid development of the robotics market calls for a concerted effort across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines to understand the transformative potential of human-robot interaction. This effort cannot succeed without the special expertise in the study of socio-cultural interactions, norms, and values that humanities research provides. This book contains the proceedings of the conference “What Social Robots Can and Should Do,” Robophilosophy 2016 / TRANSOR 2016, held in Aarhus, Denmark, in October 2016. The conference is the second event in the biennial Robophilosophy conference series, this time combined with an event of the Research Network for Transdisciplinary Studies in Social Robotics (TRANSOR). Featuring 13 plenaries and 74 session and workshop talks, the event turned out to be the world’s largest conference in Humanities research in and on social robotics. The book is divided into 3 sections: Part I and Part III contain the abstracts of plenary lectures and contributions to 6 workshops: Artificial Empathy; Co-Designing Children Robot Interaction; Human-Robot Joint Action; Phronesis for Machine Ethics?; Robots in the Wild; and Responsible Robotics. Part II contains short papers for presentations in 7 thematically organized sessions: methodological issues; ethical tasks and implications; emotions in human robot interactions; education, art and innovation; artificial meaning and rationality; social norms and robot sociality; and perceptions of social robots. The book will be of interest to researchers in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, robotics, computer science, and art. Since all contributions are prepared for an interdisciplinary readership, they are highly accessible and will be of interest to policy makers and educators who wish to gauge the challenges and potentials of putting robots in society.

This edited collection approaches the field of social robotics from the perspective of a cultural ecology, fostering a deeper examination of the reach of robotic technology into the lived experience of diverse human populations, as well as the impact of human cultures on the development and design of these social agents. To address the broad topic of Cultural Robotics, the book is sectioned into three focus areas: Human Futures, Assistive Technologies, and Creative Platforms and their Communities. The Human Futures section includes chapters on the histories and future of social robot morphology design, sensory and sonic interaction with robots, technology ethics, material explorations of embodiment, and robotic performed sentience. The Assistive Technologies section presents chapters from community-led teams, and researchers working to adopt a strengths-based approach to designing assistive technologies for those with disability or neurodivergence. Importantly, this section contains work written by authors belonging to those communities. Creative Platforms and their Communities looks to the creative cross-disciplinary researchers adopting robotics within their art practices, those contributing creatively to more traditional robotics research, and the testing of robotics in non-traditional platforms such as museum and gallery spaces. Cultural Robotics: Social Robots and their Emergent Cultural Ecologies makes a case for the development of social robotics to be increasingly informed by community-led transdisciplinary research, to be decentralised and democratised, shaped by teams with a diversity of backgrounds, informed by both experts and non-experts, and tested in both traditional and non-traditional platforms. In this way, the field of cultural robotics as an ecological approach to encompassing the widest possible spectrum of human experience in the development of social robotics can be advanced.

Trust in Human-Robot Interaction addresses the gamut of factors that influence trust of robotic systems. The book presents the theory, fundamentals, techniques and diverse applications of the behavioral, cognitive and neural mechanisms of trust in human-robot interaction, covering topics like individual differences, transparency, communication, physical design, privacy and ethics. Presents a repository of the open questions and challenges in trust in HRI Includes contributions from many disciplines participating in HRI research, including psychology, neuroscience, sociology, engineering and computer science Examines human information processing as a foundation for understanding HRI Details the methods and techniques used to test and quantify trust in HRI

This volume offers eleven philosophical investigations into our future relations with social robots--robots that are specially designed to engage and connect with human beings. The contributors present cutting edge research that examines whether, and on which terms, robots can become members of human societies. Can our relations to robots be said to be "social"? Can robots enter into normative relationships with human beings? How will human social relations change when we interact with robots at work and at home? The authors of this volume explore these questions from the perspective of philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and robotics. The first three chapters offer a taxonomy for the classification of simulated social interactions, investigate whether human social interactions with robots can be genuine, and discuss the significance of social relations for the formation of human individuality. Subsequent chapters clarify whether robots could be said to actually follow social norms, whether they could live up to the social meaning of care in caregiving professions, and how we will need to program robots so that they can negotiate the conventions of human social space and collaborate with humans. Can we perform joint actions with robots, where both sides need to honour commitments, and how will such new commitments and practices change our regional cultures? The authors connect research in social robotics and empirical studies in Human-Robot Interaction to recent debates in social ontology, social cognition, as well as ethics and philosophy of technology. The book is a response to the challenge that social robotics presents for our traditional conceptions of social interaction, which presuppose such essential capacities as consciousness, intentionality, agency, and normative understanding. The authors develop insightful answers along new interdisciplinary pathways in "robophilosophy," a new research area that will help us to shape the "robot revolution," the distinctive technological change of the beginning 21st century.

Social robotics is a cutting edge research area gathering researchers and stakeholders from various disciplines and organizations. The transformational potential that these machines, in the form of, for example, caregiving, entertainment or partner robots, pose to our societies and to us as individuals seems to be limited by our technical limitations and phantasy alone. This collection contributes to the field of social robotics by exploring its boundaries from a philosophically informed standpoint. It constructively outlines central potentials and challenges and thereby also provides a stable fundament for further research of empirical, qualitative or methodological nature.

Social robots not only work with humans in collaborative workspaces – we meet them in shopping malls and even more personal settings like health and care. Does this imply they should become more human, able to interpret and adequately respond to human emotions? Do we want them to help elderly people? Do we want them to support us when we are old ourselves? Do we want them to just clean and keep things orderly – or would we accept them helping us to go to the toilet, or even feed us if we suffer from Parkinson’s disease? The answers to these questions differ from person to person. They depend on cultural background, personal experiences – but probably most of all on the robot in question. This book covers the phenomenon of social robots from the historic roots to today’s best practices and future perspectives. To achieve this, we used a hands-on, interdisciplinary approach, incorporating findings from computer scientists, engineers, designers, psychologists, doctors, nurses, historians and many more. The book also covers a vast spectrum of applications, from collaborative industrial work over education to sales. Especially for developments with a high societal impact like robots in health and care settings, the authors discuss not only technology, design and usage but also ethical aspects. Thus this book creates both a compendium and a guideline, helping to navigate the design space for future developments in social robotics.