Talking as if

If ordinary people are to work with humanoid robots, they will need to communicate with them. But how will they do that? For many in the field, the goal is to design robots that people can talk to just as they talk to actual people. But a close look at actual communication suggests that this goal isn´t realist. It may even be untenable in principle. An alternative goal is to design robots that people can talk to just as they talk to dynamic depictions of other people - what I will call characters. As it happens, ordinary people have a great deal of experience in interpreting the speech, gestures, and other actions of characters, and even in interacting with them. But talking to characters is different from talking to actual people. So once we view robots as characters, we will need a model of communication based on different principles. That, in turn, may change our ideas of what people can and cannot do with robots.