Toward a Hybrid Society: The Transformation of Robots, from Objects to Social Agents

摘要

Social robots are machines developed to interact with humans. Unlike other technological devices, their presence in society requires accepting and treating them as social agents. This has important implications in terms of social changes for humans' personal and social identity, and social interactions. We aim to explain the core features that characterize social robots by highlighting what makes them distinct from other types of innovative technology. Equally important, we illustrate how social psychology can provide a useful perspective to understand human-robot interactions. To do so, we focus on studies that have investigated the role of intergroup relations and social identity in the context of human-machine interactions to demonstrate that robots may comprise a new type of social outgroup in future society.