On Talkwithability. Communicative Affordances and Robotic Deception

This paper operates within Mark Coeckelbergh’s framework of the linguistic construction of robots. Human-robot relations are conceptualised as affordances which are linguistically mediated, being shaped by both the linguistic performances surrounding human-robot interaction as well as the robot’s characteristics. If the robot signifies the affordance of engaging in human-human-like conversation (talkwithability), but lacks the real affordance to do so, the robot is to be thought of as deceptive. Robot deception is therefore a question of robot design. Deception by robot not only has ethically relevant consequences for the communicating individual, but also long-term effects on the human culture of trust. Mark Coeckelbergh’s account of the linguistic construction of robots as quasi-subjects excludes the possibility of deceptive robots. According to Coeckelbergh, to formulate such a deception objection, one needs to make problematic assumptions about the robot being a mere thing as well as about the authentic, which one must assume can be observed from an objective point of view. It is shown that the affordance-based deception objection to personal robots proposed in this paper can be defended against Coeckelbergh’s critique as the detection of affordances is purely experience-based and the occurrence of deception via affordance-gaps is not in principle limited to robots. In addition, no claims about authenticity are made, instead affordance-gaps are a matter of appropriate robot signals. Possible methods of bridging the affordance-gap are discussed.  – This is one of six commentaries on a 2011-paper by Mark Coeckelbergh: “You, robot: on the linguistic construction of artificial others.” Coeckelbergh‘s response also appears in this issue of Technology and Language.