As the subheading of this magazine reads, ARIA-VALUSPA stands for “Artificial Retrieval of Information Assistants -Virtual Agents with Linguistic Understanding, Social skills, and Personalized Aspects), and it consists in creating a... more
As the subheading of this magazine reads, ARIA-VALUSPA stands for “Artificial Retrieval of Information Assistants -Virtual Agents with Linguistic Understanding, Social skills, and Personalized Aspects), and it consists in creating a human-like and emotionally capable virtual agent with the ability to hold multi-modal social interactions and deal with unexpected situations. To be sure, this technology is still in process of development. Yet, it seems just a matter of time before artificial agents with affective capacities are fully functional and widely adopted. How far are we from seeing their massive introduction in society, and what sort of place does ARIA have in that enterprise? May this project have disruptive societal consequences and, if it does, of which sort are these? A prominent institution such as the Dutch Rathenau Institute for technology assessment has recently dedicated two issues to raising public awareness toward the challenges posed by intimate technologies and machine-to-human convergence. The concept of intimate technology evokes individualizing technology, but also other technologies that might contest established ideas about what is public or private, or about user autonomy and identity. As to machine-to-human convergence, the term speaks by itself. As the reader might already suspect, ARIA is both an intimate and a convergent technology. It is thus pertinent to examine whether -and to what extent- the concerns evoked by these technologies are as urgent as researchers at the Rathenau Institute want to make us believe.
