Users' Perspectives on Value Awareness in Social Robots

The ability of an artificial interactive system to understand human values and align its actions and decisions with them is important and this is particularly salient in the home environment, thanks to the greater intimacy and more relaxed social structures in private contexts. The technical aspect of building value-aware social robots is further compounded by the fact that people typically see robots as not just a designed artefact, but instead assume intentionality behind a robot's actions. However, little is known about how aware the public is about the need for value-aligned robots, how we will interact with this new and powerful technology and what place we want value-aware robots to take in our lives. This paper explores views on value-aware social robots in the home environment through a series of focus groups. The results show that people are largely unaware and as such unconcerned about a potential mismatch between a robot's behaviour and our own values.