Workers expect basic social skills but limited autonomy from future robots – a qualitative interview study and taxonomy for robot social skills
Lukas Retzer, Cornelia Niessen · 2026
Read Workers expect basic social skills but limited autonomy from future robots – a qualitative interview study and taxonomy for robot social skills by Lukas Retzer, Cornelia Niessen (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13318610.txt.
Description
Lukas Retzer and Cornelia Niessen offer a 2026 qualitative interview study. They ask what workers expect from future workplace robots. The focus is social skills and independence. Twenty workers from hospitality, manufacturing, and care jobs were interviewed. The authors also built a taxonomy of robot social skills.
Workers could state clear preferences about future robot use. Basic social skills were widely wanted. Polite, readable behaviour could be built in broadly. Freedom to act alone needed careful tuning to task and setting. Too little social skill risks negative reactions. Too much independence carries the same risk. The authors turn these views into provisional design requirements. They aim them at developers of workplace robots.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Lukas Retzer, Cornelia Niessen |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 68049 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |