Close Engagements with Artificial Companions: Key Social, Psychological, Ethical and Design Issues

Yorick Wilks

John Benjamins Publishing, 2010 - Computers - 315 pages

What will it be like to admit Artificial Companions into our society? How will they change our relations with each other? How important will they be in the emotional and practical lives of their owners since we know that people became emotionally dependent even on simple devices like the Tamagotchi? How much social life might they have in contacting each other? The contributors to this book discuss the possibility and desirability of some form of long-term computer Companions now being a certainty in the coming years. It is a good moment to consider, from a set of wide interdisciplinary perspectives, both how we shall construct them technically as well as their personal philosophical and social consequences. By Companions we mean conversationalists or confidants not robots but rather computer software agents whose function will be to get to know their owners over a long period. Those may well be elderly or lonely, and the contributions in the book focus not only on assistance via the internet (contacts, travel, doctors etc.) but also on providing company and Companionship, by offering aspects of real personalization."

Contents

• In good company? On the threshold of robotic Companions: 3
• Introducing artificial Companions: 11
• Section II Ethical and philosophical issues: 21
• Artificial Companions and their philosophical challenges: 23
• Conditions for companionhood: 29
• Digital Companions and the limits of the person: 35
• Section III Social and psychological issues: 57
• Conversationalists and confidants: 59
• Robots should be slaves: 63
• Wanting the impossible: 75
• Falling in love with a Companion: 89
• Identifying your accompanist: 95
• Look emotion language and behavior in a believable virtual Companion: 101
• New Companions: 107
• On being a Victorian Companion: 121
• Building a Companion: 129
• The use of affective and attentive cues in an empathic computerbased Companions: 131
• Towards an interactive conversational virtual Companion: 143
• A worldhybrid approach to a conversational Companion for reminiscing about images: 157
• Companionship is an emotional business: 169
• Artificial Companions in society: 173
• Requirements for Artificial Companions: 179
• You really need to know what your bots are thinking about you: 201
• Section V Special purpose Companions: 209
• A Companion for learning in everyday life: 211
• The Maryland virtual patient as a taskoriented conversational Companion: 221
• Living with robots: 245
• Section VI Afterward: 257
• Summary and discussion of the issues: 259
• References: 287
• Index: 309
• The series Natural Language Processing: 317

Bibliographic information

• Title: Close Engagements with Artificial Companions: Key Social, Psychological, Ethical and Design Issues; Volume 8 of Natural language processing
• Editor: Yorick Wilks
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing, 2010
• ISBN: 9027249946, 9789027249944
• Length: 315 pages
• Subjects: Computers / Intelligence (AI) & Semantics