Robotic embodiments of artificial agents seem to reinstate a body-mind dualism as consequence of their technical implementation, but could this supposition be a misconception? The authors present their artistic, scientific and engineering work on a robotic installation, the Articulated Head, and its perception-action control system, the Thinking Head Attention Model and Behavioral System (THAMBS). The authors propose that agency emerges from the interplay of the robot's behavior and the environment and that, in the system's interaction with humans, it is to the same degree attributed to the robot as it is grounded in the robot's actions: Agency cannot be instilled; it needs to be evoked.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.