Paper short abstract:

Humanlike robots explicate the human as a social being - not by how such robots inhabit a social humanity, but by how they fall short of it. The humanlike robot I suggest, are ideal traps for others to articulate their own humanity when engaged in human-robot conversation.

Paper long abstract:

For more than a decade professor Hiroshi Ishiguro and his staff of researchers at Intelligent Robotics Laboratory (IRL) at Osaka University has worked on creating humanlike robots in their search for the elusive nature of human nature. But what does a human nature beyond nature look like? And can we as social scientists learn something about the human by how it is articulated by digital and mechanical means?

Taking IRL's flagship robot Erica, according to IRL the most humanlike robot in the world, as empirical case, this paper discusses how Erica, both when she succeed as humanlike and when she fails, captures the human as a social and inherently relational being. Erica is first and foremost created as a communication robot, and it is thus in her conversations with human interlocutors that the visibility of humanness as a shared social property is heightened. Using the example of one conversation between Erica and an especially skilled human interlocutor this paper shows how Erica explicate the human by how she is not. The more Erica fails by her many social faux pas the more she makes her interlocutor elicit humanness enough for both of them.

Erica, this paper proposes can be understood as an epistemic trap of humanness. Despite, or maybe because of the humanity Erica lacks she entraps her interlocutor in a social bond. Through her interlocutor's human overcompensations of Erica's lack, what humans do in order to behave humanly stands out and becomes externally visible between them.