Psychological intimacy with robots? Using interaction patterns to uncover depth of relation

Abstract

Abstract-This conceptual paper broaches possibilities and limits of establishing psychological intimacy in HRI.Keywords-human-robot interaction, interaction patterns, social and moral development, authenticity, intimacy, design methodology I. PSYCHOLOGICAL INTIMACY IN HRIIn his book Love + Sex with Robots, Levy writes: "Robots will transform human notions of love and sexuality…[with humans] learning, experimenting, and enjoying new forms of relationship that will be made possible, pleasurable, and satisfying through the development of highly sophisticated humanoid robots" (p. 22) [1]. The sexual aspects that Levy refers to have already begun insofar as robot sex technologies currently exist on the retail market [2].We believe that the following will occur: (a) Because of the large amounts of money involved, there will be a growing industry around the sexual aspects of HRI, and corresponding applications; (b) at some point this issue will receive a huge amount of media coverage, and become a cross-national issue of concern; and (c) the public, and politicians, will weigh in with their viewpoints and recommendations. In turn, we believe that a key distinction that needs to frame this discourse, now and in the future, is between the physicality of sex with robots and the experience of psychological intimacy with them. For that distinction helps establish the possible limits of where and how robots can substitute for their human counterparts.Accordingly, we think it is important for the HRI community to begin to focus research agendas on the following question: Is it possible, and if so in what ways and to what extent, for people to form deep and meaningful psychologically intimate relationships with current robots and with robots of the future?Toward broaching this question, in this paper we draw illustratively from our recent research of children and adolescents interacting with the humanoid robot Robovie. The research involved children ages 9, 12, and 15 (N = 90) interacting with Robovie (controlled through a WoZ technique) in socially structured ways. While we have not yet reported the empirical psychological data from the larger study (in preparation), we have published what we called "design patterns" for establishing sociality [3], which we now refer to as "interaction patterns" -to emphasize the interactional quality of the human-robot relationship.In brief, by an interaction pattern we mean characterizations of essential features of social interaction between humans and robots, specified abstractly enough such that many different instantiations of the pattern can be uniquely realized given different types of robots, purposes, and contexts of use. We refer the reader to our previously published paper [3] for an indepth description of these interaction patterns.What we present now are some examples of where and how psychological intimacy emerged behaviorally in our data. In human-human interaction, psychological intimacy has been defined to include mutuality, connectedness, openness, reciprocity, sensitivity,...

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