In 2015, Dunstan and Koh, together with David Silvera-Tawil, held a workshop at IEEE RO-MAN in Kobe, Japan, which called for contributions attending to what was a relatively new premise: in what ways are social robots participants in, and creators of, culture? The contributions from over fifteen different countries yielded surprising breadth and depth, which signified a growing interest in the influence and contributions of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) to culture, as well as the influence of human cultures on the design and applications of social robots.
The research presented at the 2015 workshop was brought together and published as a collection of works entitled Cultural Robotics. In the opening chapter of this book, Dunstan et. al. described how robots could not only be maintainers of and participants in human culture but could also have the potential to develop their own culture, entirely unrecognisable to humans.
Koh, J.T.K.V., et al. (Eds.) Cultural Robotics. LNAI 9549. Springer. Originating from the 2015 workshop; early field-defining collection. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42945-8