Artificial intelligence (AI) agents in an embodied form, such as Jibo, Amazon Alexa, and Google Home, are increasingly becoming part of our daily lives and our homes. While there have been numerous studies in lab settings documenting short-term individual interactions with intelligent agents, we are at a point where we need to be exploring the larger impact of these technologies in the world, living with real people over longer periods of time.
From a design research perspective, understanding and developing robots and AI that intersect with society is a “wicked problem,” a problem with many components that cannot be solved without interdisciplinary approaches. Design research within interdisciplinary applications has sought to develop approaches, methods, tools, and techniques to investigate the impact of technologies and inform future development.
This work focused on investigating how human-robot interaction and human-computer interactions researchers consider and understand the societal implications of robots and embodied AI to inform the development of tools and methods for investigating the implications of these technologies.