'Is the Mobile Phone a Personalized Social Robot?' by Jane Vincent in (2013) 1 Intervalla states
This paper explores how some people use their mobile phone to manage their emotions and presentation of self to such an extent that they develop a strong bond with it, turning to it first in times of emotional need. It examines how some social robots, designed by experts to provide bespoke emotional support, can address only particular emotional problems. This is further examined by contrasting the electronic emotions managed via the mobile phone with the uses for three social robots: Amazing Ally, KASPAR and Paro. Unlike these robots, that are effective only when responding to certain pre-programmed emotions, the mobile phone appears to be a constant companion dealing with every eventuality. Imbued with the user’s feelings and emotions that surround the continuous and always on presence of the device, the user constantly turns to it for solace, to share joyous moments, recall special memories and more. The resulting close emotional and physical association with a device that is filled with the personal biography of its user is that the mobile phone becomes like a personal social robot; a co-construction of functional machine and intimate emotional experiences known only to the user.
There is a lot more that we haven’t even begun to understand well enough in ourselves to know how to implement [...] will we ever know how to build a robot like us? (Picard, 2011)
This paper explores the particular qualities of our emotional relationship with mobile phones and how it compares and contrasts with the parallel development of social (and sociable) robots. Detailed discussion of the methods for creating artificial emotions and building robots is not for this paper rather it is about how humans are making their own personalized social robots by appropriating and manipulating a particular machine in their day to day life to manage their emotions and their self. Social robot is a term that has many definitions with seemingly limitless boundaries from lift sensors responding to a presence to autonomous humanoid machines that perform complex domestic or industrial functions. Picard’s (1997) seminal research on affective computing and her continuing discourse on emotions and robots has highlighted the complexities of understanding and interpreting human actions both in ourselves and in translating these into the design of robotic machines. What happens, however, if the everyday and constant interaction with a computational machine – a mobile phone – enables the user to feel, share, manage and interpret their emotions through using the device? These electronic emotions (Vincent & Fortunati, 2009) remain within the human user but are only created, lived or relived when interacting with the mobile phone. This volte face when human feelings initiate the robotic turn is central to my discussion in this paper; it is not about a machine that has been designed (with emotions) to be a social robot but instead is about a machine that appears to have all the properties of a social robot only when combined with its human user.
As Picard notes in the introductory quote above despite our endeavors, we still do not really know or understand ourselves nor have we found a way or a technology to make a robot that might independently feel emotions. Although this technological and emotional impasse has thus far prevented humans creating a robot that is one hundred per cent human, social robots have been made that interact with particular facial or physical actions and express programmed emotions; the work of Breazeal (2003) at MIT and Ishiguro (Guizzo 2010) at Osaka University being leading examples. Social robots have also been explored in countless novels and films, often in the guise of an awkwardly jointed metal machine with some form of human transmogrification. The inclusion of emotion in the design of a robot is often heralded as a possible threat to humans for fear that it will create an out of control monster rather than a sympathetic companion (see for example I, Robot by Isaac Asimov). Research on affective computing and sociable robots such as by Picard (1997), Norman (2004), Shaw-Garlock (2009) and Turkle (2011) provides a mass of mostly positive ideas about future social and emotional robots, much of which is about putting the emotion into the robot and creating the affective turn in these otherwise mechanistic devices.
Having set out my position in this introduction, in the next section of this paper, I outline the theoretical framework for the discussion. I then continue by firstly examining what I consider to be exceptional about a mobile phone, how it might enable this extraordinary role as a kind of social robot for the self and why I believe it is these aspects of the device that set it apart from other information communication technologies (including robotic devices). I illustrate my discussion with examples from my own prior research on mobile phone use (Vincent, 2009; 2011) and from a review of three examples of social robots by way of contrast with the mobile phone: these are machines with human or animal likenesses that are designed to provide emotional support and draw out feelings to enable their human users to express themselves. Contrasting the mobile phone with these social robots I explore how it is being used in similar ways but as a device of self exploration and interaction which, because it has been created or ‘set up’ by the user, is in many ways a reflection of the personal desires and needs of their self.
