On artificial agents within human social networks: Examples, open questions, and potentialities

Social networks, which until recently were populated exclusively by human actors, are starting to become increasingly populated by artificial agents, which play various roles within them. Thus, they can be viewed as an interesting digital ecosystem, with two qualitatively different kinds of agents: biological as well as artificial. An example of such an artificial agent will be presented, which is in this case physically embodied: Sarah the FaceBot, a conversational mobile robot equipped with a social database and interaction memories. Sarah not only participates within the actual human social network by forming relationships with its physical interaction partners, but is also a member of the FaceBook social networking website, which she automatically queries for information which she uses in her dialogues, and on which she also actively deposits social information. Starting from this example, an extensive discussion of open questions, purposes, and potentialities regarding the introduction of artificial agents within human social networks will take place, exposing multiple avenues towards beneficial application of such agents within the newly arising digital ecosystem of hybrid human-machine social networks.