ABSTRACT
The promises of social or sociable robots certainly have some of the flavor of the classic progressive claims for technologies of the past. Now the specter is raised of new kinds of impacts on human cognitive and emotional, as well as social and cultural, states and processes. What will happen to us if more and more of us spend increasing amounts of time with robots capable of becoming Mr. Rogers or Kate Smith and incapable of becoming Prof. Nietzsche or Virginia Woolf? We can look forward to robots in “just like us” terms, robots that have human forms of mentalities and emotions. We could, on the other hand, look forward to robots in “robots as robots” terms, robots that have machine mentalities and emotions. In either case, humans are going to be the “likeness” against which we will measure the qualities and achievements of social or sociable robots. In the end, the limits of social and sociable robots are not in the limits of silicon and steel but in the limits of our interpretative courage and recklessness. We really have no more and nothing different to fear from these robots than we do from our fellow humans.
