Exploring Human-Robot Social Relations

Abstract

An age where robots and advanced intelligent agents are all around us is nearing. It is important we explore the ways we will relate to these future robots, because that way we can try to avoid certain scenario's while encouraging others. The 'Lovotics' research domain sketches a future where robots can be our friends, lovers and family, but is that really a possibility? To find the answer to that question we need some way to identify types social relations of humans and robots. Therefore I start with defining a social-relation framework that can differentiate between human social relations such as friendship, family relations, business relations and many others. Before we can apply this framework to human-robot relations however, we need to explore the capabilities of future robots and identify to what extend these robots can have the required properties for social relations. Finally we will see what shortcomings robots necessarily have that will limit our social relations with robots to a certain level.