Artificial Intelligence on the Boards that Mean the World
“The Answering Machine” – Interdisciplinary Project on Human-Machine Interaction on the Theatre Stage
“The Answering Machine” is the name of an interdisciplinary project led by Prof. Stefan Scherbaum from the Technical University of Dresden, in collaboration with colleagues from Stuttgart, Tübingen, and Zurich. The project aims to study spontaneous human-machine interaction on the theatre stage. Four public performances are planned, including one in Dresden. The initiative is one of seven projects selected by the Volkswagen Foundation under the Artificial Intelligence program and is funded with a total of €1.3 million.
Social bots—machines that interact with humans as social partners—are increasingly present in everyday life. So far, they mostly appear as software robots on social media platforms, where they like, retweet, post texts, and comment. They possess natural language capabilities and can even communicate synchronously with users as chatbots. But what happens when they leave the cyber world and suddenly face us in person? How does this affect us as interaction partners, and how will our interactions with these machines evolve?
In The Answering Machine, a scientific consortium seeks to use the theatre stage as a quasi-experimental artistic-scientific laboratory to explore these questions from the perspective of applied anthropomorphism—attributing human characteristics to social bots. On stage, the four collaborating disciplines—psychology, computational linguistics, theatre studies, and media studies—come together to test specific research questions and refine their concepts. Over a four-year series of experiments and performances, actors will interact with social bots. Various parameters, derived from psychology, media studies, and improvisational theatre, will be varied to identify emotional, behavioral, and cognitive patterns, understand the conditions of humanization in detail, apply them in psychological training, reflect on media-theoretical implications, and create simulations for a general human-machine co-evolution to bring into public discourse.
“Social interaction is often studied in the lab in a very limited way. In this project, we can approach the topic in a far more valid setting and learn not only about humans but also about their relationship to machines,” comments Stefan Scherbaum, Professor of Methods in Psychology and Cognitive Modeling at TU Dresden. “At TU Dresden, we will study the cognitive processes of social interaction. Using behavioral and neuroscientific methods, we aim to investigate both the conditions for successful social interaction and possible interventions to improve it. One of the four planned public performances will also take place in Dresden.”
Participants
Prof. Dr. Stefan Scherbaum (Faculty of Psychology, Technical University of Dresden)
Dr. Gunter Lösel (Department of Performing Arts and Film, Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland)
Prof. Dr. Jonas Kuhn (Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Stuttgart)
Prof. Dr. Susanne Nicole Marschall (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Tübingen)
Press Contact:
Prof. Dr. Stefan Scherbaum
Methods in Psychology and Cognitive Modeling
TU Dresden
Email: stefan.scherbaum@tu-dresden.de