“Alexa, how are you feeling today?”

Abstract

‘Smart’ devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. While these sophisticated machines are useful for various purposes, they sometimes evoke feelings of eeriness or discomfort that constitute uncanniness, a much-discussed phenomenon in robotics research. Adult participants (N = 115) rated the uncanniness of a hypothetical future smart speaker that was described as possessing the mental capacities for experience, agency, neither, or both. The novel condition prompting participants to attribute both agency and experience to the speaker filled an important theoretical gap in the literature. Consistent with the mind perception hypothesis of uncanniness (MPH; Gray & Wegner, 2012), participants in the with-experience condition rated the device significantly higher in uncanniness than those in the control condition and the with-agency condition. Participants in the with-both (experience and agency) condition also rated the device higher in uncanniness than those in the control condition and the with-agency condition, although this latter difference only approached statistical significance.

‘Imagine this Smart Speaker to Have a Body’:An Analysis of the External Appearances and the Characteristics that People Associate with Voice Assistants

“…Furthermore, the appearance of robots affected the attribution of qualities like trustworthiness (Schaefer et al, 2012). Moreover, impressions of devices were also affected by the characteristics of the devices such as perceived agency (Gray et al, 2007) and by interindividual differences such as age (Pradhan et al, 2019), experience (Taylor et al, 2020), and personality (Tharp et al, 2017).…”

Ascribing consciousness to artificial intelligence: human-AI interaction and its carry-over effects on human-human interaction

“…Whether that is possible, and how, is still debated (e.g., Koch, 2019 ). However, it is undeniable that children and adults attribute consciousness to AI through Theory of Mind attributions ( Kahn et al, 2012 ; Broadbent et al, 2013 ; Eyssel and Pfundmair, 2015 ; Martini et al, 2016 ; Tanibe et al, 2017 ; Świderska and Küster, 2018 ; Heyselaar and Bosse, 2020 ; Küster and Świderska, 2020 ; Taylor et al, 2020 ). Some researchers have argued that consciousness is fundamentally an attribution, a construct of social cognitive machinery, and that we attribute it to other people and to ourselves ( Frith, 2002 ; Graziano, 2013 ; Prinz, 2017 ).…”