Creating Socially Adaptive Electronic Partners: Interaction, Reasoning and Ethical Challenges

Technology for supporting people in their daily lives such as personal assistant agents and smart homes carry great potential for making our lives more connected, healthy, efficient and safe by executing tasks on our behalf and guiding our actions. We make two key observations: 1) supportive technology is inherently social in the sense that its support to a user is subject to norms from people in the user’s social context (e.g., family members and caregivers), and 2) existing supportive technology is rigid in its realization of this social nature by hardwiring norms into the technology. This rigidity leads to violation of unsupported norms and inflexibility in dealing with violation of supported norms. In this paper we argue that supportive technology should be able to adapt to diverse and evolving norms of people in unforeseen circumstances, in order to better support people in their daily lives. We conceptualize this vision by proposing the novel concept of a Socially Adaptive Electronic Partner (SAEP), and outlining interaction, reasoning, and ethical challenges that need to be addressed to realize the creation of SAEPs. This requires techniques that span the areas of normative agents, human-agent teamwork, and ethics of AI, putting the multi-agent systems field in a unique position to do this.