When is a Robot really Social? An Outline of the Robot Sociologicus

The article explores the idea of understanding the “social” in the emerging field of Social Robotics from an explicitly sociological perspective, and more specifically from Sociological Theory of Action. It suggests to ground the basic architecture of the “social robot” on generalized expectations as a solution for the main problem of Social Robotics widely acknowledged in the field itself – the problem of finding an adequate way of reducing the complexity of social situations. Two preconditions for the question about the robot sociologicus to make sense at all are discussed: its relation to the tradition of AI-critique, and the question whether Social Robotics has, other than the heterogeneous field of Service Robotics, has developed to a distinguished field of research. Some evidence is presented that the problem of complexity of social situations is a central issue in the field itself, not at least methodologically. Drawing on this evidence, and applying a sociological model of the reasoning process of social actors, an architectural blueprint is developed that tries to catch central aspects of a “really social” robot from a sociological perspective while working with central issues from the discourse of Social Robotics itself. Finally, some possible uses of the robot sociologicus are sketched, both from a sociological perspective and as a possible contribution to the interdisciplinary fields of Social Robotics and human-computer interaction research.

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