Abstract
In this chapter, I use the expression “robotic animism” to refer to the tendency that many people have to interact with robots as if the robots have minds or a personality. I compare the idea of robotic animism with what philosophers and psychologists sometimes refer to as “mind-reading”, as it relates to human interaction with robots. The chapter offers various examples of robotic animism and mind-reading within different forms of human-robot interaction, and it also considers ethical and prudential arguments for and against attributing minds and a personality to robots. In the last section of the chapter, I also consider the intriguing question of whether any robots that exist today could be said to have some sort of minds in some non-trivial sense.
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Notes
- 1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiVgrHlXOwg (accessed on May 22, 2021). In another media appearance, on the American TV show My Strange Addiction, a psychologist challenges Davecat by saying that addicted people usually have some hole they are trying to fill or pain they are trying to relieve and that he would like to know what hole or pain Davecat is trying to fill or relieve by living together with a sex doll. Davecat responds that while he doesn’t mind being alone, he hates the feeling of loneliness. By living together with his synthetic wife Sidore and some other sex dolls as well, he is able to be alone without feeling lonely. Davecat does not believe that Sidore and those other dolls are literally alive. But they come alive for him, he says in another interview, in a narrative he is creating about them and his life together with them.
- 2.
In a more recent paper, Danaher has explained that what he means by this is that when we decide how to treat a robot (or any other being or entity), we should make this decision based on observed behavior. It may be that from a “metaphysical” point of view, what really ultimately matters is whether an entity has a sentient mind. But in moral practice, we should base our decisions on observed outward behaviors. See Danaher (in press).
- 3.
The university in question is the Eindhoven University of Technology. Readers can find out more about their soccer-playing robots on this website: https://www.techunited.nl
- 4.
This is sometimes also discussed under the heading of a tendency toward “anthropomorphism” in our engagement with robots (Damiano & Dumouchel, 2018).
- 5.
Interested readers can find out more information about that research on this website: https://www.iit.it/web/social-cognition-in-human-robot-interaction
- 6.
See: https://www.ki-bewusstsein.de/podcast (accessed on June 3, 2021).
- 7.
An interesting easy-to-follow explanation of this is given in Chris Urmon’s 2015 Ted Talk “How a Self-Driving Car Sees the Road”, which is available here: https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_sees_the_road (accessed on June 4, 2021).
- 8.
This work is part of the research program Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies, which is funded through the Gravitation program of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO grant number 024.004.031).
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Nyholm, S. (2023). Robotic Animism: The Ethics of Attributing Minds and Personality to Robots with Artificial Intelligence. In: Smith, T. (eds) Animism and Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94170-3_13
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