How That Robot Made Me Feel

An edited collection that explores what emotions we have when encountering robots, how we react emotionally to them in different contexts, and why these emotional responses are so important.

Do robots, or the AI that is driving them, have emotions? That is a hotly debated topic—both in science fiction, where such assertions are a staple of the narrative, and in tech development, where it often makes headlines. But what about how we humans emotionally respond to robots? Are our emotional responses any less important when it comes to how the robots we encounter today are designed? In How That Robot Made Me Feel, Ericka Johnson asks the authors in this collection to critically examine our emotional and affective responses to robots, and what such an examination would do to the way roboticists use (or toy with) our emotions in their design decisions.

The narrative arc of this anthology follows the question of just whose emotions are being engaged through robotic interactions, why, and for what design ends. Of course, the answer is that it is our emotions that are interesting. And these emotions are not universal, despite the historically universalist paradigm of AI and how robotic emotions work. Emotions are contingent, to borrow a commonly used phrase in feminist technoscience. They are placed in space, time, and cultural context. And understanding how they are produced and engaged with will help clarify many of the political aspects of robotic interaction that are currently concealed by the shiny and allegedly neutral surfaces of robots.Contents
Introduction
1. Emotion AI, the Perils of “Speaking for,” and Empathy as Imposition
Jennifer Rhee
2. The Role of Intentionality in Human-Robot Interaction
Tom Ziemke
3. The Way Things Feel: Working with a Non-Humanlike AI Colleague in the Control Room
Ahmet Börütecene
4. Robots Playing with Emotions: Commodifying Human Emotions
Roger Søraa and Mark Kharas
5. Robot Animals and the Emotional Labor of Caregivers
Marcus Persson, Clara Iversen, and David Redmalm
6. Robot Meets Pets
Ericka Johnson
7. The Imperfectly Relatable Robot
Katherine Harrison, Kavyaa Somasundaram, and Amy Loutfi
8. The Difference Between You and Me(chanical) Robot
Karin Danielsson
9. Western and Buddhist Psychological Models of Emotion for Human-Robot Flourishing
Daniel White and Hirofumi Katsuno
Bibliography
Index
List of Contributors“Thought-provoking and perspective-flipping, How That Robot Made Me Feel brings human to the fore of human–robot interaction in all its complexity.”
—Giulia Perugia, Assistant Professor in Human–Robot Interaction, Eindhoven University of Technology

"A radically pluralist exploration of social roboticists’ participation in the ‘emotion business,’ this work makes a timely call for new robots cultivated with compassion over emotional commodification."
—Tom Williams, author of Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice

"This wonderfully diverse set of essays will refresh the discourse around emotion in human–robot interactions, recentering human experience and opening up productive new avenues of development."
—Katie Winkle, Assistant Professor in Social Robotics, Uppsala University

"This collection traces the affective connections that animate humanoid robots, relocating emotions from states inherent in bodies to evocative encounters inscribed with history, culture, and politics."
—Lucy Suchman, author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations and Neural NetworksEricka Johnson is a Professor of Gender and Society at Linköping University, Sweden; Director of the National Graduate School of the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems, and Software Program—Humanity and Society (WASP-HS); and a Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. She is the author of many books, including A Cultural Biography of the Prostate (MIT Press).