Philosophy
Discussions on human identity is abundant in philosophy, e.g., works by Locke or Parfit among others, but philosophical views are yet to be fully integrated into thinking about robo-identity. One line of thought that is relevant in HRI would be the distinction between substance vs. consciousness view on identity, i.e., am I the same "me" based on the continuance of the body that I have vs. continued memory? Even if a person loses their memory over time, there is a semblance of a singular identity that we often attribute to them based on character traits or psychological unity. When one's human identity is psychologically distributed across different voices, we categorize such experiences as psychological maladaptation, e.g., schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder.
But unlike our human identity that we experientially equate with a body or psychologically normative stream of memories, an artificial identity can more easily travel across various digital forms, e.g., all-in-one ‘‘Siri’’ across multiple devices. When one's smartwatch and smart speaker has a unified identity within an ecosystem, or when various apps on a phone have different identities, we would not think of this as "broken" or "schizophrenic" technology. Thus, our expected norms about human vs. robot identity may be different. For robo-identity, we do not yet know if a single identity across various devices and modalities is a desirable goal, or what it would even mean to construct a unified artificial identity as a sum of which disparate parts, e.g., hardware, software, and data. Furthermore, ethical issues are many, ranging from "hijacked" robo-identity during body transference to fragmented user experience and autonomy. A related concern is on whether a robot's identity can and should be treated in a similar way as a person's identity. Lastly, given prior research on how technology can influence one's moral sense of self through, e.g., compassion there is potential in exploring how to best design artificial identity to help with our own identity development.
Design
Previous work in the field of HRI has looked into the notion "migrating robots", and found that participants could easily perceive when one "identity" moved from one device to another. However, it was not clear when would it be beneficial to do so. More recent work has taken a design research approach to explore how migrating agents are perceived, specifically on when they can provide value for a range of contexts, e.g., in personal or professional settings, or in service contexts. Initial findings show that people may favor migrating robots across a single service, or in stressful situations. However, many design questions on migrating agents are still left unanswered---what new design opportunities do migrating agents offer? In which situations do individuals prefer agents that do not migrate? How are migrating robot identities perceived across a range of contexts? In the workshop we intend to discuss the work that exists in this complex design space, and identify some of the open-ended questions that require further investigation.
Embodiment
Who robots come across as has consequences on our actions. Robots' various forms of embodiment are known to change our behaviour and situational awareness. Embodiment type, e.g., a VR agent vs. a physical robot, impacts people's perceived enjoyment of interacting with a robot pereira2008icat. Hence, how to sync identity traits across different bodies is an engineering and design challenge.
Humans interact through various means of communication, from computer-mediated communication to face-to-face interaction, with a singular identity, yet robot conversational partners' identities in different contexts remain unclear. This is due to physical constraints that arise with robot embodiment and related multimodal behaviour. The identity features of the migratable agent such as voice or visual characteristics is restricted based on the software and hardware capabilities of the embodiment. This leads to the challenge of how to map an agent's identity features to its embodiment and multimodal capabilities during its identity migration.
Another issue is not only an agent's identity, but how much knowledge it has on users' identity for each type of body it moves to. A migratable agent lacks contextual understanding of users' information. This opens up the question of how might an agent behave when it transfers to another form. For instance, an interesting challenge is on how much user information an agent should take with it when it migrates to a different embodiment in public vs. private settings.This workshop aims to discuss the design and engineering challenges over how should robots migrating through different forms of embodiment use the available channels of communication to convey their identity to users.