Abstract
Increasing evidence suggests the acceleration of a "loneliness epidemic" in the West, mainly driven by the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Promises of advances in artificial intelligence (AI) claim that human-machine communication (HMC) will be able to mitigate the disruptive forces of this pandemic. Communicative and social robots are programmed to better serve the communicative and emotional needs of people and therefore help to mitigate subjective loneliness.
Yet, should communicative and social robots mitigate loneliness? Despite the promises made about advancements in AI and HMC, this project argues we need to investigate the normative implications for the practice of communication when HMC becomes broadly adopted to mitigate loneliness. This is important because communication has a constitutive role in societies. Moreover, the long-term societal consequences of such changing perspectives on companionship, communication, care, and empathy are unknown, but they could be significant.
This project approaches the condition where communication does no longer uniquely takes place between humans but also between humans and machines as a unique historical marker of our times, conceptualizing it as the post human communication condition. Drawing on a number of qualitative and participatory research methods, this project will investigate (1) what the normative stakes are for societies in relation to the post-human communication condition, (2) the key promises, values, and ideals incorporated in the development of human-machine communication to mitigate loneliness and "ordinary" people's (imagined) meanings, emotions, and feelings on the adoption of human-machine communication to mitigate loneliness.
Drawing on these investigations, this project seeks to set an agenda for the critical study of the post-human communication condition. Thereby, it seeks to contribute to the future directions of the normative study of communication in relation to the development and broad adoption of communicative and social robots.
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