Attribution of autonomy and its role in robotic language acquisition

Frank Förster,Kaspar Althoefer

doi:10.1007/s00146-020-01114-8

Frank Förster, Kaspar Althoefer

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01114-8

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Abstract

The false attribution of autonomy and related concepts to artificial agents that lack the attributed levels of the respective characteristic is problematic in many ways. In this article, we contrast this view with a positive viewpoint that emphasizes the potential role of such false attributions in the context of robotic language acquisition. By adding emotional displays and congruent body behaviors to a child-like humanoid robot’s behavioral repertoire, we were able to bring naïve human tutors to engage in so called intent interpretations. In developmental psychology, intent interpretations can be hypothesized to play a central role in the acquisition of emotion, volition, and similar autonomy-related words. The aforementioned experiments originally targeted the acquisition of linguistic negation. However, participants produced other affect- and motivation-related words with high frequencies too and, as a consequence, these entered the robot’s active vocabulary. We will analyze participants’ non-negative emotional and volitional speech and contrast it with participants’ speech in a non-affective baseline scenario. Implications of these findings for robotic language acquisition in particular and artificial intelligence and robotics more generally will also be discussed.

Highlights

Humans appear to have the general tendency to interpret events and processes of unknown origin in agent-centric ways (Levinson 1995)
The relevant speech was originally gathered during two experiments that targeted the acquisition and grounding of linguistic negation (Förster et al 2018, 2019). In addition to these two corpora, we will use another corpus of speech transcripts as a baseline which was gathered during an experiment that preceded the two negation experiments (Saunders et al 2012). The latter focused on the robotic acquisition and lexical grounding of object labels and of words relating to object attributes such as color or size
If we assume that the participants express what they felt, they can be said to engage in a multitude of attributions of emotions, volition, and autonomy

Summary

Introduction

Humans appear to have the general tendency to interpret events and processes of unknown origin in agent-centric ways (Levinson 1995). Human intelligence is lopsided, with a preference for social explanations when confronted with effects and processes of unknown origin and causation This ‘cognitive skewness’ may be a side effect of our intelligence being the intelligence of a highly social species. Adaptive Systems Research Group, School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield AL10 9AB, UK which they genuinely do not possess, or which they possess to a lesser degree than is attributed to them This tendency seems to be especially strong when humans perceive a lack in meaningful connections to other humans as is the case when they feel lonely (Epley et al 2008). As we will outline below, the attribution of emotion is one element of the attribution of agency more generally

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