Artificial intelligence and social robotics

the power of appearances

Abstract

In this article we propose to relate the fields of scientific and technological study, on the one hand, to Artificial Intelligence, on the other, to Social Robotics, with the purpose of addressing the current state of the problem of technological imitation of the human. Since its beginning, in the middle of the twentieth century, the field of artificial intelligence has been plagued by this problem, which has generated debates around whether intelligent machines should take human intelligence as a model, or whether they should aspire to imitate their products. At the same time, Robotics, whose origin is marked by a fictional and speculative component, began to consolidate itself as a scientific discipline with concrete technological developments that incorporate Artificial Intelligence products. As a result, Robotics also found itself crossed by the divide between making robots in a human style or, on the contrary, generating technical beings who only perform human tasks. The accelerated development of Robotics expanded the problem of intellectual aspects to the appearance of bodies. We want to present here a historical tour of this articulation and provide, at the same time, a current panorama of this issue, especially based on the consolidation in recent years of Social Robotics. We believe that this sub-discipline offers us a privileged scope to analyze the debates surrounding the philosophical problem of anthropological specificity and its artificial replication via contemporary technical knowledge.