Social Robotics and the person problem

Like computers before them, social robots can be used as a fundamental research tool. Indeed, they can help us to turn our attention from putative inner modules to thinking about the flow and emergence of human intellectual powers. In so doing, much can be gained from seeking solutions to MacDorman’s person problem: how can human bodies – and perhaps robot bodies – attune to cultural norms and, by so doing, construct themselves into persons? This paper explores the hypothesis that social robots can be used to ask fundamental questions about the nature of human agency. For social robots to live up to their name, the focus needs to fall on functional co-ordination and co-action. This enables one to link research on how today’s robots function as social mediators with engineering approaches that explore both how understanding can be hard-wired, how this influences the cultural ecology and, perhaps, in designing robots that can discover how we enact values. To do this new kinds of collaboration need to be established. The key theoretical question is whether, in becoming persons, humans depend on embodiment alone or, as suggested here, intrinsic motive formation enables them to discover the distributed forms of embodiment favoured by culture.