Growing Up With Social Robots: Scientific, Ethical, and Theological Anthropological Perspectives on Social Robots, AI Companions, and Child and Adolescent Development

We discuss the increasing presence of social robots (SRs) and artificial intelligence (AI) companions in the contemporary ecology of youth development and the role of parasocial relationships created by youth with these technical artifacts, emphasizing the links between parasocial relationships and both immediate and long-term youth thriving. We also discuss the ethical implications of this scholarship and, because conceptions of human thriving rest on ontological conceptions found in both scientific and theological writing, we use Christian anthropology as a sample case for considering the meaning of being human and whether the physical or functional attributes designed for SRs or AI companions are or can be made to be commensurate with the attributes of humans. We argue that the meaning of being human lies not in reductionist and mechanist accounts of behavior and development but, rather, in a dynamic, holistic understanding of human life as relational and involving developmentally-nurturant relationships between people and their social, cultural, and physical ecological world.