Henry Powell, University of Warwick, UK

Commitments are often thought to be instrumental in galvanising certain kinds of human social activity. Specifically, they are thought to play essential roles in the coordination and cooperation of individuals that makes group activity as effective as it is. It is, however, not entirely clear how exactly these three things are supposed to fit together. That is, what kinds of relations we should understand there to be between commitment, coordination, and cooperation – if any at all. Resolving this problem has obvious benefits, not only in allowing us to understand the structure of these kinds of human interactions but also by providing us the grounds from which we might be able to engineer similarly effective interactions between humans and robots. In this response I would like to raise some questions about how commitments should be thought to fit into our understanding of both coordination and cooperation and similarly, how coordination and cooperation should be thought to fit into one another. Having done this, I will consider how understanding the relation between commitment, cooperation, and coordination might benefit the development of robots designed to interact with humans in social, palliative, and industrial spheres.