Chatbots and the Domestication of AI: A Relational Approach

by Hendrik Kempt

Overview

This book explores some of the ethical, legal, and social implications of chatbots, or conversational artificial agents. It reviews the possibility of establishing meaningful social relationships with chatbots and investigates the consequences of those relationships for contemporary debates in the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. The author introduces current technological challenges of AI and discusses how technological progress and social change influence our understanding of social relationships. He then argues that chatbots introduce epistemic uncertainty into human social discourse, but that this can be ameliorated by introducing a new ontological classification or 'status' for chatbots. This step forward would allow humans to reap the benefits of this technological development, without the attendant losses. Finally, the author considers the consequences of chatbots on human-human relationships, providing analysis on robot rights, human-centered design, and the social tension between robophobes and robophiles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030562908
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	09/26/2020
Series:	Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	389 KB

About the Author

Hendrik Kempt, PhD, is Postdoctoral scholar at the Applied Ethics Group at RWTH Aachen University. He has obtained his PhD from Aachen with works on the ethical concerns of using AI for medical diagnostics and has published several monographs on philosophical challenges regarding emerging technology, including “Synthetic Friends - A Philosophy of Human-Machine Friendship” (2022) and “(Un-)Explainable Technology” (2024), both with Palgrave Macmillan. He is also the author of a number of articles on related topics and the co-editor of “RuPaul’s Drag Race and Philosophy” (2019).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Methods.- Chapter 3: Social Relationships.- Chapter 4: Conversational Artificial Agents.- Chapter 5: Chatbots as Social Agents.- Chapter 6: Social Reverberations.- Chapter 7: Conclusion.