Computational modelling of robot personhood and relationality
- Media
- book
- Title
- Computational modelling of robot personhood and relationality
- Author
- William F. Clocksin
- Review published as
- 148092
- Edited by
- Springer Nature Link
- ISBN
- 978-3-031-44159-2
If humans and robots were able to roam around the same spaces, mutually recognizing each other for what they are, how would those interactions go? How can we model such interactions in a way that we can reason about and understand the implications of a given behavior? This book aims to answer this question.
The book is split into two very different parts, with chapters 1 through 3 mostly written from a philosophical perspective. They look at issues related to personhood, that is, how androids can be treated as valid interaction partners in a society with humans, and how interactions with them can be seen as meaningful. In doing so, several landmarks of the past 40 years in the artificial intelligence (AI) field are reviewed. Chapter 1 starts by framing the possibility of having sentient androids exist in the same plane as humans, without them trying to pass as us or vice versa. Chapter 2 explores the “Significant Concerns” that make up a society and give it coherence, and chapter 3’s “Personhood and Relationality” describes how this permeates from a society into each of the individuals that make it up, the relations between them, and the social objects that bring individuals closer together (or farther apart).
The second part of the book is written from a very different angle, and the change in pace took me somewhat by surprise. Each subsequent chapter presents a different feature of the Affinity system, a model that follows some aspects of human behavior over time and in a given space. Chapter 4 introduces the Affinity environment: a 3D-simulated environment with simulated physical laws and characteristics, where a number of agents (typically 30 to 50) interact. Agents have a series of attributes (“value memory”), can adhere to different programs (“narratives”), and gain or lose on some vectors (“economy”). They can sense the world around them with sensors, and can modify the world or signal other agents using effectors.
The last two chapters round out the book, as expected: the first presents a set of results from analyzing a given set of value systems, and the second gives the author’s conclusions. However, I was expecting more–perhaps a link to download the Affinity system so that readers can explore it further, or at least a more complete comparison of results than the evaluation of patterns resulting from a given run.
Nevertheless, the book is an interesting and fun read, with important insights in both the first and second parts. There is a certain lack of connection between their respective rhythms, and the second part indeed builds on the concepts introduced in Part 1. Overall, an enjoyable read despite falling short of expectations.