Cover not available
Part of
Risk Discourse and Responsibility
Edited by Annelie Ädel and Jan-Ola Östman
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 336] 2023
► pp. 172–189

Chapter 7
Risk and responsibility in human-robot interaction

An interactional approach

ORCID logo | University of Southern Denmark

In this chapter, I argue that interaction researchers have a large toolbox available to analyze the quality of current human-robot interactions, allowing us to identify possible risks concerning the introduction of social robots into our societies. I illustrate how interactional analyses can serve to evaluate the quality of human-robot interactions on sample studies of an interview interaction with Sophia the Robot and tutoring interactions of the iCub robot with a focus on how the interaction partners take each other into account. The results indicate potential risks even in seemingly enjoyable and tightly coordinated human-robot interactions, which suggests that interaction researchers may want to take responsibility for contributing to the risk assessment of introducing social robots into our social spaces.

Keywords: robotics, human–machine interaction, interaction quality, recipient design, risk assessment
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The problem addressed
  • 3.Approach
  • 4.Sample analysis: Recipient design
    • 4.1Example 1: An interview with Sophia the Robot
    • 4.2Example 2: Responsive tutoring interactions with the iCub
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.336.07fis
References
Bajorek, J. P.
2019 “Voice Recognition still has Significant Race and Gender Biases.” Harvard Business Review 10.Google Scholar
Bangerter, A., and E. Major
2013 “Interactional Theories of Communication.” In Theories and Models of Communication. Handbook of Communication Science, ed. by P. Cobley, and P. J. Schulz, 257 – 271. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bavelas, J. B., L. Coates, and T. Johnson
2000 “Listeners as Co-Narrators.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 (6): 941. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, P., and S. C. Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, H. H.
1996 Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, H. H., and M. A. Krych
2004 ”Speaking while Monitoring Addressees for Understanding.” Journal of Memory and Language 50 (1): 62–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, H. H., and K. Fischer
2023 “Social Robots as Depictions of Social Agents.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46 (21): 1–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deppermann, A.
2013 “Multimodal Interaction from a Conversation Analytic Perspective.” Journal of Pragmatics 46 (1): 1–7. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Visser, E. J., M. M. Peeters, M. F. Jung, S. Kohn, T. H. Shaw, R. Pak, and M. A. Neerincx
2020 “Towards a Theory of Longitudinal Trust Calibration in Human–Robot Teams.” International Journal of Social Robotics 12 (2): 459–478. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Epley, N., A. Waytz, and J. T. Cacioppo
2007 “On Seeing Human: A Three-Factor Theory of Anthropomorphism.” Psychological Review 114 (4): 864. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Faelens, L., K. Hoorelbeke, R. Cambier, J. van Put, E. Van de Putte, R. De Raedt, and E. H. Koste
2021 “The Relationship Between Instagram Use and Indicators of Mental Health: A Systematic Review.” Computers in Human Behavior Reports 4: 100121. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Filipi, Anna
2009 Toddler and Parent Interaction: The Organisation of Gaze, Pointing, and Vocalisation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2021 “Effect Confirmed, Patient Dead: A Commentary on Hoffman & Zhao’s ‘Empirical Primer’.” ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction 10 (1) Article 9: 1–4. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Kerstin, Kilian Foth, Katharina Rohlfing, and Britta Wrede
2011 “Mindful Tutors – Linguistic Choice and Action Demonstration in Speech to Infants and Robots.” Interaction Studies 12 (1): 134–161. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Kerstin, Johanna Seibt, Raffaele Rodogno, Majken Rasmussen, Astrid Weiss, William Juel, Leon Bodenhagen, and Norbert Krüger
2020 “Integrative Social Robotics Hands-On.” Interaction Studies 21 (1): 145–191. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoffman, G., and X. Zhao
2020 “A Primer for Conducting Experiments in Human–Robot Interaction.” ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI) 10 (1): 1–31.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Gail
1984 Notes on Some Orderlinesses of Overlap Onset. In Discourse Analysis and Natural Rhetoric ed. by Valentina D’Urso & Paoli Leonardi, 11–38. Padua, Italy: Cleup Editore.Google Scholar
Jefferson, G.
2004 “A Note on Laughter in ‘Male–Female’ Interaction.” Discourse Studies 6 (1): 117–133. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kay, Matthew, Cynthia Matuszek, and Sean A. Munson
2015 “Unequal Representation and Gender Stereotypes in Image Search Results for Occupations.” In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3819–3828. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, J., S. Lemaignan, C. Montassier, P. Lavalade, B. Irfan, F. Papadopoulos, E. Senft, and T. Belpaeme
2017 “Child Speech Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction: Evaluations and Recommendations.” In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 82–90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, J., P. Baxter, and T. Belpaeme
2017 “Nonverbal Immediacy as a Characterisation of Social Behaviour for Human–Robot Interaction.” International Journal of Social Robotics 9 (1): 109–128. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee, H.-R., E. Cheong, C. Lim, and K. Fischer
2022 “Configuring Humans: What Roles Humans Play in HRI Research.” Proceedings of the IEEE Human-Robot Interaction Conference 2022 DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lemaignan, S., F. Garcia, A. Jacq, and P. Dillenbourg
2016 “From Real-time Attention Assessment to ‘With-me-ness’ in Human-Robot Interaction.” In 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 157–164. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C.
2006 On the Human “Interaction Engine”. In Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Symposium 134, 39–69. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
1983 Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ligthart, Mike, Koen Hindriks, and Mark A. Neerincx
2018 “Reducing Stress by Bonding with a Social Robot: Towards Autonomous Long-term Child–Robot Interaction.” In Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 305–306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lohan, K. S., K. J. Rohlfing, K. Pitsch, J. Saunders, H. Lehmann, C. L. Nehaniv, K. Fischer, and B. Wrede
2012 “Tutor Spotter: Proposing a Feature Set and Evaluating It in a Robotic System.” International Journal of Social Robotics 4 (2): 131–146. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Malle, Bertram, Kerstin Fischer, James Young, A. Jung Moon, and Emily Collins
2020 “Trust and the Discrepancy between Expectations and Actual Capabilities of Social Robots.” In Human-Robot Interaction: Control, Analysis, and Design, ed. by D. Zhang, and B. Wei, 1–23. New York: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
Maynard, D. W., and J. Heritage
2005 “Conversation Analysis, Doctor–Patient Interaction and Medical Communication.” Medical Education 39 (4): 428–435. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Metta, G., G. Sandini, D. Vernon, L. Natale, and F. Nori
2008 “The iCub Humanoid Robot: An Open Platform for Research in Embodied Cognition.” In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems, 50–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mondada, L.
2018 “Multiple Temporalities of Language and Body in Interaction: Challenges for Transcribing Multimodality.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 51 (1): 85–106. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 “Contemporary Issues in Conversation Analysis: Embodiment and Materiality, Multimodality and Multisensoriality in Social Interaction.” Journal of Pragmatics 145: 47–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moore, R. K.
2019 “Talking with Robots: Opportunities and Challenges.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.00369.Google Scholar
Pentland, Alex
2010 Honest signals: How they shape our world. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Richardson, K.
2016 “Sex Robot Matters: Slavery, the Prostituted, and the Rights of Machines.” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 35 (2): 46–53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rueben, M., A. M. Aroyo, C. Lutz, J. Schmölz, P. Van Cleynenbreugel, A. Corti, S. Agrawal, and W. D. Smart
2018 “Themes and Research Directions in Privacy-Sensitive Robotics.” In 2018 IEEE Workshop on Advanced Robotics and Its Social Impacts (ARSO), 77–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, H., E. A. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson
1974 “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50 (4): 696–735. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, E. A.
2010 “Some Other ‘uh (m)’s.” Discourse Processes 47 (2): 130–174. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A.
1982 “Discourse as an Interactional Achievement: Some Uses of ‘Uh Huh’ and Other Things that Come Between Sentences.” In Georgetown University Roundtable on Languages and Linguistics 1981; Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk, ed. by Deborah Tannen, 71–93. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Schegloff, E. A., G. Jefferson, and H. Sacks
1977 “The Preference for Self-Correction in the Organization of Repair in Conversation.” Language 53 (2): 361–382. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smedegaard, C. V.
2019 (March). “Reframing the Role of Novelty within Social HRI: From Noise to Information.” In 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 411–420. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sparrow, Roger, and Linda Sparrow
2006 In the Hands of Machines? The Future of Aged Care. Minds and Machines 16: 141–161. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Turkle, S.
2016 Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin.Google Scholar
2020 “A Nascent Robotics Culture: New Complicities for Companionship.” In Machine Ethics and Robot Ethics, ed. by Wendell Wallach, and Peter Asaro, 107–116. Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Turkle, S., C. Breazeal, O. Dast, and B. Scassellati
2006 “Encounters with Kismet and Cog: Children Respond to Relational Artifacts.” In Digital Media: Transformations in Human Communication, ed. by P. Messaris, and L. Humphreys. New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Ullman, Daniel, and Bertrand F. Malle
2018 What Does it Mean to Trust a Robot? Steps toward a Multidimensional Measure of Trust. In Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 263–264.Google Scholar