Socially Impaired Robots: Human Social Disorders and Robots' Socio-Emotional Intelligence
This work addresses the problem of ensuring safe human-robot interaction for society by preventing socially impaired robots, but it is incremental as it builds on existing survey and conceptual frameworks.
The paper surveys human social disorders like autism, psychopathy, and schizophrenia to identify capability requirements for social robots, arguing that robots need socio-emotional intelligence to avoid societal risks and proposing simulation-driven models and design guidelines.
Social robots need intelligence in order to safely coexist and interact with humans. Robots without functional abilities in understanding others and unable to empathise might be a societal risk and they may lead to a society of socially impaired robots. In this work we provide a survey of three relevant human social disorders, namely autism, psychopathy and schizophrenia, as a means to gain a better understanding of social robots' future capability requirements. We provide evidence supporting the idea that social robots will require a combination of emotional intelligence and social intelligence, namely socio-emotional intelligence. We argue that a robot with a simple socio-emotional process requires a simulation-driven model of intelligence. Finally, we provide some critical guidelines for designing future socio-emotional robots.