Relying on a large corpus of natural interactions between visitors and a robot in a museum setting, we study a recurrent practice through which humans ‘worked’ to maintain the robot as a competent participant: the description by bystanders, in a way that was made accessible to the main speaker, of the social action that the robot was taken to be accomplishing. Doing so, bystanders maintained the robot’s (sometimes incongruous) behaviour as relevant to the activity at hand and preserved the robot itself as a competent participant. Relying on these data, we argue that ex ante definitions of a robot as ‘social’ (i.e. before any interaction occurred) run the risk of naturalizing as self-evident the observable result from micro-sociological processes: namely, the interactional work of co-present humans through which the robot’s conduct is reconfigured as contextually relevant.

中文翻译：

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“扮演机器人的代言人”：旁观者对机器人在公共场所行为的描述


依靠博物馆环境中参观者与机器人之间的大量自然互动，我们研究了人类“努力”维持机器人作为合格参与者的反复实践：旁观者以易于理解的方式进行描述向主要发言人介绍机器人要完成的社会行动。通过这样做，旁观者可以维持机器人的（有时不协调的）行为与当前的活动相关，并保持机器人本身作为一个有能力的参与者。依靠这些数据，我们认为，将机器人预先定义为“社交”（即在发生任何交互之前）存在将微观社会学过程的可观察结果自然化为不言而喻的风险：即，机器人的交互工作-通过人类的存在，机器人的行为被重新配置为与上下文相关。