Abstract

Increasingly, roboticists have to pay attention to cultural norms and expectations. But roboticists have generally worked with a relatively narrow understanding of culture, based on nationality. This contrasts with the rich and diverse understandings of culture from disciplines as diverse as sociology, philosophy, and anthropology. Here we draw on the philosophy of science literature on scientific terminology to argue that culture is a conceptually fragmented concept: the concept has no unified definition, and alternative definitions of culture are useful for different areas within robotics. We argue that this has important implications for robotics. We consider two possible reactions to this situation. One claims that, despite the lack of a unified definition, the concept of culture still fulfils useful roles within robotics, and ought to be preserved. The other argues that the problems with the concept are so great that the concept ought to be eliminated from discussions in robotics. We argue in favour of the former option.

中文翻译：

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文化机器人需要文化吗？概念碎片化以及文化与机器人设计融合的问题

摘要

机器人专家必须越来越关注文化规范和期望。但机器人专家通常对基于国籍的文化理解相对狭隘。这与社会学、哲学和人类学等不同学科对文化的丰富而多样的理解形成鲜明对比。在这里，我们利用有关科学术语的科学哲学文献来论证文化是一个概念上支离破碎的概念：这个概念没有统一的定义，文化的替代定义对于机器人技术的不同领域是有用的。我们认为这对机器人技术具有重要意义。我们考虑对这种情况的两种可能的反应。有人声称，尽管缺乏统一的定义，但文化概念在机器人技术中仍然发挥着有用的作用，应该被保留。另一种观点认为，这个概念存在很大的问题，应该从机器人技术的讨论中消除这个概念。我们赞成前一种选择。