The Need for Novelty in Social Roles: Exploring Robots in Social Roles from the Perspective of Interactional Novelty

Abstract

Human relations are inescapably premised by the human capacity for thinking and acting with deliberate deviation from predictable, habitual, patterns of thought and action (i.e., what traditional philosophy largely understands as free-will or ‘spontaneity’). Whenever a human performs a given social role, this capacity should be included as a component of the subjective performance-dimension. Here, I reframe the capacity as a replenishable source of ‘interactional novelty’. I then propose that social robots equally bring to social interactions their own special type of novelty experiences. Comparing the nature of two types of novelty, I argue two claims. First, whereas the human type of interactional novelty lies as a continuous potential, the robotic type of novelty may only be a temporary phenomenon. Second, while not identically realized, there are good reasons to explore to which extent human interactional novelty can be substituted by robotic types of experiential novelty. With contextual knowledge of how novelty-experiences arise, it is worth speculating whether we can develop social robot applications that simulate and sustain novelty experiences with the same or at least similar interactional novelty effects that are found in some human social roles.