Rethinking the Ⅰ-You relation through dialogical philosophy in the Ethics of AI and robotics

摘要

When I embarked on organizing a special issue for AI and society, I thought it was the perfect place to showcase the philosophical work of Martin Buber and his seminal work I and Thou (Buber 1937) in reference to developments in relational robotics and AI. In technological circles today terms such as 'social' no longer mean relating with another person face to face, but now it can be done sitting alone at a computer. Social interaction then has moved away from the embodied experience in time and space to a disconnected experience mediated by machines. Machine medi-ated-communication draws on its antecedents of mediating communication by mail or telephones, which do not require the persons engaging in the communication to be present in the same physical space. Telephones could transport voices that give users an experience of direct communication, though it is a disembodied voice. Online chat allows instant mail to be sent and received, giving conversations the quality of real-time though bodies are not present with each other. The senders and recipients of messages are having a direct experience of interacting with each other through a machine.