Called Back Onstage

Called Back Onstage: Dramaturgic Analysis, Domestic Social Robots, and Privacy

Coggins, T.N. (TU Delft Ethics & Philosophy of Technology)

Hakli, Raul (editor)
Mäkelä, Pekka (editor)
Seib, Johanna (editor)

2023

I argue that social robots installed inside homes produce a novel privacy problem when they invite their users to engage with them. To build my case, I introduce relevant concepts from Erving Goffman’s theory of Dramaturgic Analysis to interpret human-robot interactions. Following Goffman, I posit that we pre-reflectively adjust our behavior to communal expectations and perform as characters when interacting with other people in public. We tend to step into character when we encounter familiar social situations, which, I argue, includes those created by robots that mimic human social behavior. Our homes, ideally, enable us to set aside the characters we play in public to pursue private tasks associated with our well-being, autonomy, and intimate relationships. As such, when domestic social robots elicit social responses from users, they may rob users of time they could otherwise dedicate to valuable private activities—an issue I categorize as a privacy problem.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:bbf1d868-e1a9-491f-b47a-52cb3a63fde0

https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA220632

IOS Press

2023-07-01

978-1-64368-374-4

Social Robots in Social Institutions - Proceedings of Robophilosophy 2022

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, 0922-6389, 366

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

book chapter

© 2023 T.N. Coggins