Making sense of agentic objects and teleoperation

Abstract

Agentic objects are those entities that are perceived and responded to in-the-moment as if they were agentic despite the likely reflective perception that they are not agentic at all. They include autonomous robots, but also simpler systems like automatic doors, trashcans, and staplers--anything that seems to possess agency. It is well known that low-level spatiotemporal information elicits in-the-moment responses that are interpreted as perceiving mentalism [8, 17], but people reflectively believe that there is a distinction between human and non-human agents. How are we to make sense of these agentic objects?