Abstract
A major criticism social robots often face is that their integration in real social, human environments will dehumanize some of the roles currently being played by the human agents. This implicitly overestimates the social skills of the robots, which are constantly being upgraded, but which are still far from being able to overshadow humans. Moreover, it reflects loosely rational fears that robots may overcome humans in the near future. This paper points to a direction opposite to mainstream, and claims that robots can induce humanizing feelings in humans. In fact, current technological limitations can be managed to induce a perception of social fragility that may lead human agents to reason about the social condition of a robot. Though robot and/or technology phobias may bias the way a social robot is perceived, this reasoning process may contribute to an introspection on the meaning of being social and, potentially, to contribute to humanizing social environments.
Highlights
Nowadays, a common topic of debate is that robots, social and asocial, will dehumanize societies.With the demography in many developing countries showing the ageing of societies, multiple activities require increasing levels of automatization
The role of the media, nudging people to extreme emotional states of mind, prevents a proper perception of the advantages of social robots
It seems a question worth some analysis if media ethics related to robotics is beneficial to society in general
Summary
A common topic of debate is that robots, social and asocial, will dehumanize societies. One may conjecture an exponential decrease—the interest in human-robot interaction and related issues has been referred to as increasing exponentially (see, for example [18,19]), which, assuming an optimistic view of R&D time-to-market, supports the conjecture As it is happening with other autonomous/intelligent technologies, e.g., autonomous cars, as the distance approaches zero, the difficulty of the scientific/engineering problems scales up The role of the media, nudging people to (sometimes) extreme emotional states of mind (as caused by the fear induced by a hypothetic social domination by robots), prevents a proper perception of the advantages of social robots It seems a question worth some analysis if (generically) media ethics related to robotics is beneficial to society in general. It does not seem plausible that social robots be a mass solution to increase the efficiency of educational processes
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