IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2018 - 24

These include anxieties about the communication capabilities of robots (e.g., a robot may be unable to understand a complex conversation), anxieties about
behavioral characteristics (e.g., what speed a robot will
move at or what it will do next), and anxieties about discourse with robots (e.g., being unsure how to talk to a
robot or whether the robot has understood one's utterance). Many of these concerns are summarized in the
Robot Anxiety Scale [6]. In addition, Ray and colleagues
[4] have identified technical dysfunctions and a felt loss
of control as particularly strong fears towards robots -
issues that recently even have been picked up by the
European Parliament's draft for a union-wide robot law
[36]. In this draft, the implementation of a mandatory
"kill switch" in every robot is requested to prevent people from malfunctioning machines.

Robots will need to base their
behavior on on human needs by
understanding and anticipating them.

24

devices. In other words, roboticists have realized that
robots need humans! Leveraging on human-robot collaboration, rather than minimizing it, could be a possible solution to approach the desired level of adaptability
and proficiency in dealing with complex tasks. As a
result, robots now more often aim at exploiting their
interaction with humans (being it physical or cognitive)
to learn such complex concepts, as human common
sense, and to complement their behavioral efficiency
with the adaptability, intuitiveness, and creativity proper of human-human interaction (e.g., see the Robotics2020 Strategic Research for Robotics in Europe
https://www.eu-robotics.net/cms/upload/topic_groups/
SRA2020_SPARC.pdf).
Humans in these instances therefore become partners, not just "users," and the relationship between
human and robot is not unidirectional (or absent) anymore, but depends on both the interacting agents. We
posit that for this dynamic equilibrium to work and for
it to bring the expected benefits, robots will have to
become more humane, so as to establish an effective
mutual understanding with their partners and carry
part of the effort needed to maintain the interaction.

From Humanlike Robots to Humanized
Interaction: A New Design Paradigm of
Mutual Understanding

Reality of Robots

The Human in "Humanized"

While some fears about robots are provoked by social
or "emotional" machines made for their users' personal
environments, many of people's fears described above
also derive from the machines currently deployed in the
automotive and electronic industries. Those robotic
platforms are usually bulky and frightful, positioned in
cages where no human is allowed during operation and
requiring an expert user perfectly trained to operate
them. Although we can imagine that robots envisioned
for diffusion in society will be different in shape and
applications, the idea that robots are built to work efficiently with no need of humans lingers in most people's
mind. This kind of thinking leads to an assumption that
robots might replace humans or that, to interact with a
robot, it will be the responsibility of the human user to
learn a potentially complex sets of instructions, with no
adaptation from the robotic side.
However, this conception of robots is deeply changed
even from the industrial perspective. Current industries
require flexibility and versatility, the capacity to change
activity and learn new processes in relatively short
time, something that humans are much better at than
robots. Moreover, many human skills - as the ability to
deal with unforeseen issues or some manual and creative skills - are still far from being matched by robotic

Humanizing human-robot interaction means that the
machines will need to become considerate of humans.
Much research has already been devoted to make computers and technology more respectful of human necessities, including from a socio-ethical perspective [44],
[45]. Now, robots will have to base their behavior on
human needs by anticipating and understanding them,
and they will have to communicate in understandable
ways relative to humans (see Figure 1). To achieve this
goal, robotic research needs to move beyond the tradition of seeking more powerful and efficient systems,
and to focus instead on such novel concepts as robot
transparency, legibility, and predictability and on skills
entailing understanding and anticipating humans and
their needs.
It is important to stress that humanizing does not
necessarily imply choosing an anthropomorphic appearance for a robot and does not require that robots replicate exactly all possible human activities or simulate
human emotion. Rather, it suggests that robots need to
"be considerate of people," i.e., maintain a model of
humans in order to understand and predict human
needs, intentions and limitations. It suggests robots
need to use ways of communicating and cooperating
that are intuitive for the human partner. This interactive

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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march 2018
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2018
