Motivational and cognitive underpinnings of fear of social robots that become "too human for us"

Maria Paola Paladino, Jeroen Vaes, and Jolanda Jetten start with the case of the social robot named Sophia, a highly sophisticated android, which was invited to join a meeting organized by the UN in 2017. Its appearance is that of a young woman; in addition, Sophia appears to be able to hold a conversation and display appropriate emotional reactions. Social robots such as Sophia generally elicit contrasting emotions: pride for the technological success that we as humans have reached goes hand in hand with fears and concerns that come with the idea that those mechanical agents—that look and behave as human—will soon be part of our everyday interactions. Relying on research in social psychology and on the uncanny “valley phenomenon” (introduced by Mori, 1970), this chapter focuses on those fears and explores the role that the resemblance of robots to humans—that is, “robot humanization”—might play. In the first part, the possibility that fears regarding the entrance of social robots into society at large are linked to the potential threat they pose to our conception of humanness and of the human identity are discussed. In the second part of their chapter, the perspective changes to focus on the limits of our cognitive system in dealing with high-humanlike robots, like androids. Focusing on recent research on the uncanny valley, they discuss the possibility that negative emotional reactions to androids are the result of more complex processing of high-humanlike mechanical agents. The chapter ends by discussing some of the societal implications of these two perspectives.