303AutomAtion From love to wAr
7.1.3 Exploring Articial Social Intelligence
With regard to the ambition to build socially intelligent and mor-
ally competent robots, a similar argument can be made. In the short
or medium term, it is not expected that robots will display elaborate
social and moral behavior. Developing socially intelligent robots, that
is, “robots that show aspects of human style social intelligence, based
on deep models of human cognition and social competence” (Fong,
Nourbakhsh, & Dautenhahn, 2003, p. 145), is a very long-term goal.
ere is also strong doubt whether it is at all possible to build ethical
decision making into machines in a human-like, nonreductionist way.
Despite this, many R&D eorts are put into making ICT more
“social.” is goal is part and parcel of the vision of ambient intelli-
gence (AmI), which has been driving the ICT research agenda of, for
example, the European Commission and many big ICT rms since
the start of this century. In this vision, humans are surrounded by
“smart environments,” with computers that are aware of which person
is present and what characteristics, emotions, needs, and intentions
they have. A smart environment can adjust to, react to, and anticipate
this. e AmI vision has a signicant impact on the development of
ICT in the elds of care, mobility, and the domestic environment.
For example, the AmI vision oers a new view on the way in which
we should deal with our health in the future: we should have per-
sonal health care that is automated as much as possible (Schuurman,
Moelaert El-Hadidy, Krom, & Walhout, 2009). Emphasis within
the AmI vision originally lay on information, communication, and
amusement. Under the inuence of robotics, the past few years have
seen increased attention on the automation of physical tasks. e ulti-
mate goal is a well-educated robot that can help humans with every-
day tasks. us, robotics has become a supportive element of the AmI
vision. As a consequence, the goals of developing socially situated
robots (robots that can perceive and react to a certain social environ-
ment) and socially embedded robots (robots that are able to interact
with agents and humans, and are at least partially aware of human
interactional structures, such as taking turns) have become integral
parts of the AmI vision.
Human–machine interaction is an important part of mod-
ern robotics research. Contemporary robots are still very limited