Significant segments of the HRI literature rely on or promote the ability to reason about human identity characteristics, including age, gender, and cultural background. However, attempting to handle identity characteristics raises a number of critical ethical concerns, especially given the spatiotemporal dynamics of these characteristics. In this paper I question whether human identity characteristics can and should be represented, recognized, or reasoned about by robots, with special attention paid to the construct of race, due to its relative lack of consideration within the HRI community. As I will argue, while there are a number of well-warranted reasons why HRI researchers might want to enable robotic consideration of identity characteristics, these reasons are outweighed by a number of key ontological, perceptual, and deployment-oriented concerns. This argument raises troubling questions as to whether robots should even be able to understand or generate descriptions of people, and how they would do so while avoiding these ethical concerns. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of what this means for the HRI community, in terms of both algorithm and robot design, and speculate as to possible paths forward.
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Robo-Identity: Exploring Artificial Identity and Multi-Embodiment
Interactive robots are becoming more commonplace and complex, but their identity has not yet been a key point of investigation. Identity is an overarching concept that combines traits like personality or a backstory (among other aspects) that people readily attribute to a robot to individuate it as a unique entity. Given people's tendency to anthropomorphize social robots, "who is a robot?" should be a guiding question above and beyond "what is a robot?" Hence, we open up a discussion on artificial identity through this workshop in a multi-disciplinary manner; we welcome perspectives on challenges and opportunities from fields of ethics, design, and engineering. For instance, dynamic embodiment, e.g., an agent that dynamically moves across one's smartwatch, smart speaker, and laptop, is a technical and theoretical problem, with ethical ramifications. Another consideration is whether multiple bodies may warrant multiple identities instead of an "all-in-one" identity. Who "lives" in which devices or bodies? Should their identity travel across different forms, and how can that be achieved in an ethically mindful manner? We bring together philosophical, ethical, technical, and designerly perspectives on exploring artificial identity.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734456
- PAR ID:
- 10276021
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- HRI '21 Companion: Companion of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 718 to 720
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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