AIIC AI Intelligence Centre

SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

A Robot Among People:From Social Imitation to the Social Becoming of Human Groups

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 11, 2026 · UTC

Robots designed to mediate human groups often fall into the solutionist trap: they are framed as sociable agents that fix problems such as conflict, disengagement, or lack of coordination. We suggest a different way of thinking. Rather than discrete agents, robots can be understood as situated elements of shared environments; catalysts and carriers of group experience whose meaning emerges through how people position, interpret, and interact with them. From this perspective, robots are not there to repair some ostensible dysfunctionality, but to enable group-level sense-making around care, nor

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType
paper
region
Global

Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-20T18:22:04.777Z. This is not the publication date.