Children's Social Relationships With Current and Near‐Future Robots

Abstract

Children will come of age with increasingly sophisticated social robots, which mimic both animal and human form. Will children develop social and even moral relationships with these robots? In this article, we review some of the research that suggests that the answer is yes. We propose that through the creation of social robots, a new ontological category is emerging, one that does not map onto humans, animals, or artifacts. We raise the concern that because these robots can be conceptualized as both social entities and objects, children might dominate them and reify a master–servant relationship, and that in such ways, this could lead to detrimental developmental outcomes, even as the robots benefit children in other ways. We also call on the developmental field to recognize the exponential growth of technological systems in children's lives, and to be future oriented to remain relevant.

An Ethical Evaluation of Human–Robot Relationships

“…On the other hand they are inanimate because they are programmed machines. So it seems like a new ontological category is about to emerge through the creation of socially interactive robots, and this process magnifies when robots become increasingly sophisticated in their social abilities [39]. This line of work suggests that socially interactive robots should be perceived as a new technological genre, which has been argued by other researchers in social robotics as well [85].…”

“…For instance, people act upon or talk to some robots as if the robot has sensations and emotions, even though existing robots are not sentient and lack feelings. Indeed, people's social responses to robots have been reported in many human-robot interaction studies, e.g., [6,39,41,47,72]. A lot of robot ethics discussions focus on the technological abilities of robots, i.e., what is in the 'mind' of the robot [8].…”

“…This phenomenon is known as the media equation [56], which has also been successfully applied to the field of social robotics, e.g., [39,41]. People have a tendency to assign a level of intelligence and sociability to robots which affects the perceptions of those people of the way interactions should proceed.…”

“…Understanding about this topic is an essential requirement for discussions about the social and ethical issues regarding what roles we (want to) allow robots to fulfill in our lives. Research in the area of human-robot interaction provides evidence that people can establish some kind of emotional or social bond with socially interactive robots [33,39,41,72,78]. A socially interactive robot is a robot that elicits social responses from their human users because they follow the rules of behavior expected by these human users [31].…”

Engineering Cheerful Robots: An Ethical Consideration

“…For instance, by age 4, most children categorize prototypical living and non-living kinds, and typically designate robots to the inanimate category; but findings that children tend to attribute aliveness to robot pets with which they interact may indicate the emergence of a new ontological category that disrupts current animate/inanimate distinctions [29][30][31][32]. Commentators may comment on the desirability (or otherwise) of inevitable consequences of a technologized social reality.…”