Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

Working together, Edsigner and Domo appear to be learning from each other.
(Turkle, 2011, p. 156)
That sociable robots can generate such strong reactions within humans is potentially
concerning. The feeling of the uncanny occurs when the familiar is presented
in unfamiliar form (Freud, 1976). The uncanny results when standard categories
used to classify the world disappear (Turkle, 2011). Turkle (2011) called one such
instance, when a sociable robot is uncritically accepted as a creature, the robotic
moment. Edsinger’s reactions to Domo illustrated its occurrence: “And this is where
we are in the robotic moment. One of the world’s most sophisticated robot ‘users’
cannot resist the idea that pressure from a robot’s hand implies caring” (p. 160).
At issue in the robotic moment is a radical recasting of the posthuman
(Hayles, 1999). “The boundaries between people and things are shifting”
(Turkle, 2011, p. 162). The designers of sociable robots scaffold their creations by
taking advantage of the expert social abilities of humans. The robotic moment,
though, implies a dramatic rethinking of what such human abilities entail. Might
human social interactions be reduced to mere sense-act cycles of the sort employed
in devices like Kismet? “To the objection that a robot can only seem to care or
understand, it has become commonplace to get the reply that people, too, may only
seem to care or understand” (p. 151).
In Hayles’ (1999) definition of posthumanism, the body is dispensable, because
the essence of humanity is information. But this is an extremely classical view. An
alternative, embodied posthumanism is one in which the mind is dispensed with,
because what is fundamental to humanity is the body and its engagement with
reality. “From its very beginnings, artificial intelligence has worked in this space
between a mechanical view of people and a psychological, even spiritual, view of
machines” (Turkle, 2011, p. 109). The robotic moment leads Turkle to ask “What will
love be? And what will it mean to achieve ever-greater intimacy with our machines?
Are we ready to see ourselves in the mirror of the machine and to see love as our
performances of love?” (p. 165).
5.12 The Architecture of Mind Reading
Social interactions involve coordinating the activities of two or more agents.
Even something as basic as a conversation between two people is highly coordinated,
with voices, gestures, and facial expressions used to orchestrate joint actions
(Clark, 1996). Fundamental to coordinating such social interactions is our ability to
predict the actions, interest, and emotions of others. Generically, the study of the
ability to make such predictions is called the study of theory of mind, because many
theorists argue that these predictions are rooted in our assumption that others, like
us, have minds or mental states. As a result, researchers call our ability to foretell
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