Bringing up and booting up: social theory and the emergence of socially intelligent robots

Abstract

Sociologists have been all but absent from the various efforts to build artificial life and intelligence, and even from the more recent research and development in social and humanoid robotics. Those sociologists who have addressed issues in AI and social robotics have adopted contrary positions based on shared premises. H. Collins, for example, is a sociological skeptic. He claims that the very idea of an intelligent machine contradicts "a basic premise of knowledge science because a machine is not a community or a member of society." Collins is one of the pioneers in the study of knowledge, science, and belief as social constructions. In his analyses of AI, he focuses on the constraints imposed on machines as potentially thinking, conscious, and emotional entities. If we are going to have 19 machines who think" we are going to have to have "machines who live with us and share our society". As long as machines are not members of our society, they cannot "imitate our intelligent, activities".