Chapter 7. Risk and responsibility in human-robot interaction

Abstract

In this chapter, I argue that interaction researchers have a large toolbox available to analyze the quality of current human-robot interactions, allowing us to identify possible risks concerning the introduction of social robots into our societies. I illustrate how interactional analyses can serve to evaluate the quality of human-robot interactions on sample studies of an interview interaction with Sophia the Robot and tutoring interactions of the iCub robot with a focus on how the interaction partners take each other into account. The results indicate potential risks even in seemingly enjoyable and tightly coordinated human-robot interactions, which suggests that interaction researchers may want to take responsibility for contributing to the risk assessment of introducing social robots into our social spaces.