Robot – Digital Anthropology

Kerstin Dautenhahn is Professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Hertfordshire. Her research interests include social learning, human-robot interaction and social robotics. She is the co-creator of KASPAR, a robot designed to help children with autism develop communication skills.
Making the third presentation at this event, Kerstin explained her background in biological cybernetics, and the ways that her work revolves around the interactions between humans and robots/AI, concerned particularly with systems that aim to help people.
She was concerned to be immediately clear: robots are not people.
Elaborating, she pointed out that each robot you encounter is a de novo creation, not only lacking a common biological heritage with humans – making them unavoidably alien, but without any necessary shared characteristics (either deep or apparent) with any other robot.
Further, now and for the foreseeable future (in her opinion), robots have no psychology – there is no ‘mind’ in there.
The term robot, then, is a moving target, without a firm definition (I was surprised that we weren’t reminded of the etymological origin of the word ‘robot’ in the Czech word for ‘slave’), so that any conversation about robots must be particularly clear as to terms. This, however, is difficult, because of two very strong human traits;