Human-Machine Communication

Abstract

Ethics and HMC? From (Positivist) Opposition to Complementarity and Convergence It might be thought that Human-Machine Communication (HMC) and ethics have little, if anything to do with one another. To be sure, those engaged in the more technical sides of HMC-ICT designers, software engineers, roboticists, and so on-are at least nominally beholden to the ethics codes and guidelines of their specific professional organizations (e.g., ACM 1992). But more broadly, ethics and technology have largely been kept separate-until relatively recently. In Part I, I explore these backgrounds and developments in three interrelated ways, beginning with how technological developments themselves help forge dialogue between ethicists and philosophers with computer scientists and engineers: the same pattern is further apparent in the rise of "robo-philosophy" over the past decade or so. Secondly, transformations in our understanding of science have led specifically to conceptions of complementarity between science (as the ground of technology) and ethics. Lastly, these complementarities are instantiated in striking examples of convergence between applied ethics and technical fields emerging from the praxis of contemporary ICT projects and especially contemporary ethics of design-including, finally, emerging requirements for autonomous systems. Across the course of Part I, I will also introduce the primary ethical frameworks that come into play as they emerge in conjunction with specific developments and projects. This approach thereby highlights how these frameworks assume significance and influence "from

Ontological Boundaries between Humans and Computers and the Implications for Human-Machine Communication

“…Human-Machine Communication as an area of research is so named to signal the difference in the nature of its communicators, with "machine" purposely used instead of "technology" as an acknowledgment of the long cultural, philosophical, and technological history regarding machines in relation to humans (see Guzman, 2018). In this study, the machine is conceptualized as a meta-ontological category encompassing multiple technologies.…”

“…Within this context, the formal study of communication emerged and came to focus primarily on people (e.g., Schramm, 1982). In contrast, artificial intelligence and related fields have theorized communication as the exchange of information between sender and receiver, which can be a human or machine (see Guzman, 2018). The ontological divide within AI, and now communication following the establishment of HMC (Guzman & Lewis, 2019), is not predicated upon whether people or computers communicate but on how they communicate.…”

“…Interactions with machines, particularly initial interactions, require people to first determine the nature of the communicator, what it is, that then determines subsequent communication behavior (Dautenhahn, 2004). Exactly what people determine a digital interlocutor to be influences their assessment of it as a message source (Sundar & Nass, 2001) and their judgment of how it should be treated (A. P. Edwards, 2018).…”

“…As has been discussed, technologies designed as communicators also merge traits of people and computers and, in some instances, even animals. The question, then, is how people assign ontological categories to devices and programs that bring together traits across ontological boundaries (A. P. Edwards, 2018).…”

Interlocutors and Interactions: Examining the Interactions Between Students With Complex Communication Needs, Teachers, and Eye-Gaze Technology

“…the social and the material are considered to be inextricably related-there is no social that is not also material, and no material that is not also social" (p. 1437). Likewise, for human-machine communication scholars the distinction of humans and technologies is purely an abstraction since these entities relationally enact each other in everyday practice (Guzman, 2018). Drawing from this co-constitutive and human-machine communication theoretical frame, we designed our study of the interpersonal communication between teachers and students to also take into account the eye-tracking technology itself.…”