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SUMMARY:Affordance Mixtures in Robotics and AI: Novelty of Designed System
 s without Anthropomorphism - Arzu Formanek
DTSTART;TZID=US/Central:20260716T133000
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DTSTAMP:20260726T082143Z
UID:pretalx-iacap-2026-HFSAWV@pretalx.iacapconf.org
DESCRIPTION:Robots and AI technologies are often compared to humans. But\,
  such systems have their own capability distributions which anthropomorphi
 c projection and comparing against human benchmarks fail to capture. The i
 diosyncratic combinations of what these systems can do and cannot do calls
  for non-anthropomorphic descriptions and concepts. Easy tasks for humans 
 are typically hard for such computational systems\, while tasks humans fin
 d harder can be much easier to engineer. Thus\, depending on what they are
  to be used for\, what is technologically feasible and economically viable
 \, the design of these systems mixes various such tasks\, without any evol
 utionary logic binding the parts together. The result is systems with a ge
 nuinely novel profile with action and interaction possibilities—with the
 ir own affordances—entering our open environments. This paper introduces
  two interconnected concepts to capture this: _affordance mixtures_ and _a
 ffordance jumps_. For robots and AI\, affordance mixtures name the specifi
 c combinations of human-like and non-human affordances\, which further com
 bines designed-object characteristics with an active-agent-like behavior
 —at radically discontinuous levels and in configurations that are not en
 countered in nature. Affordance jumps are the specific discontinuities wit
 hin that mixed profile: absent co-occurrences of affordances\, surface aff
 ordances implying depths that are not there\, or affordances exceeding any
 thing the surface suggests\, and familiar outputs through unfamiliar mecha
 nisms with uninferrable failure modes. Together these concepts have implic
 ations for how these technologies and interaction with them should be onto
 logically understood\, morally and empirically evaluated\, and how they sh
 ould be designed.
LOCATION:Apollo Auditorium
URL:https://pretalx.iacapconf.org/iacap-2026/talk/HFSAWV/
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