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SIR, I have read with considerable interest Mr. L. R. Sparrow's paper ‘Pipeline Protection in the Middle East,’ published in your January and February issues of CORROSION TECHNOLOGY.

Role-taking is a basic social process underpinning much of the structural social psychology paradigm – a paradigm built on empirical studies of human interaction. Yet today, our social worlds are occupied by bots, voice assistants, decision aids, and other machinic entities collectively referred to as artificial intelligence (AI). The integration of AI into daily life presents both challenges and opportunities for social psychologists. Through a vignette study, the authors investigate role-taking and gender in human-AI relations.

Participants read a first-person narrative attributed to either a human or AI, with varied gender presentation based on a feminine or masculine first name. Participants then infer the narrator's thoughts and feelings and report on their own emotions, producing indicators of cognitive and affective role-taking. The authors supplement results with qualitative analysis from two open-ended survey questions.

Participants score higher on role-taking measures when the narrator is human versus AI. However, gender dynamics differ between human and AI conditions. When the text is attributed to a human, masculinized narrators elicit stronger role-taking responses than their feminized counterparts, and women participants score higher on role-taking measures than men. This aligns with prior research on gender, status, and role-taking variation. When the text is attributed to an AI, results deviate from established findings and in some cases, reverse.

This first study of human-AI role-taking tests the scope of key theoretical tenets and sets a foundation for addressing group processes in a newly emergent form.

After dealing in Part 1 with the actual corrosion of pipelines under the varied atmospheric and ground conditions in the Middle East, Mr. Sparrow deals with practical problems in the construction of groundbeds in the desert, their siting, and the siting of terminals and tank farms. Stress is laid on the importance of regular and thorough checking of pipeline protection methods, both pipe wrapping and cathodic protection.

In the protection of buried steelwork, the trend nowadays is to use the most durable and insulating coating available at moderate cost, applied as perfectly as an economic speed of construction will permit, and to supplement this with cathodic protection. Part 1 of this article discusses the practical considerations and difficulties in applying both coating and cathodic protection to pipelines in the Middle East.

This paper aims to study the role of self-concept in consumer relationships with anthropomorphised conversational artificially intelligent (AI) agents. First, the authors investigate how the self-congruence between consumer self-concept and AI and the integration of the conversational AI agent into consumer self-concept might influence such relationships. Second, the authors examine whether these links with self-concept have implications for mental well-being.

This study conducted in-depth interviews with 20 consumers who regularly use popular conversational AI agents for functional or emotional tasks. Based on a thematic analysis and an ideal-type analysis, this study derived a taxonomy of consumer–AI relationships, with self-congruence and self–AI integration as the two axes.

The findings unveil four different relationships that consumers forge with their conversational AI agents, which differ in self-congruence and self–AI integration. Both dimensions are prominent in replacement and committed relationships, where consumers rely on conversational AI agents for companionship and emotional tasks such as personal growth or as a means for overcoming past traumas. These two relationships carry well-being risks in terms of changing expectations that consumers seek to fulfil in human-to-human relationships. Conversely, in the functional relationship, the conversational AI agents are viewed as an important part of one’s professional performance; however, consumers maintain a low sense of self-congruence and distinguish themselves from the agent, also because of the fear of losing their sense of uniqueness and autonomy. Consumers in aspiring relationships rely on their agents for companionship to remedy social exclusion and loneliness, but feel this is prevented because of the agents’ technical limitations.

Although this study provides insights into the dynamics of consumer relationships with conversational AI agents, it comes with limitations. The sample of this study included users of conversational AI agents such as Siri, Google Assistant and Replika. However, future studies should also investigate other agents, such as ChatGPT. Moreover, the self-related processes studied here could be compared across public and private contexts. There is also a need to examine such complex relationships with longitudinal studies. Moreover, future research should explore how consumers’ self-concept could be negatively affected if the support provided by AI is withdrawn. Finally, this study reveals that in some cases, consumers are changing their expectations related to human-to-human relationships based on their interactions with conversational AI agents.

This study enables practitioners to identify specific anthropomorphic cues that can support the development of different types of consumer–AI relationships and to consider their consequences across a range of well-being aspects.

This research equips marketing scholars with a novel understanding of the role of self-concept in the relationships that consumers forge with popular conversational AI agents and the associated well-being implications.

The service sector is at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the eighteenth century. Robotics in combination with rapidly improving technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), mobile, cloud, big data and biometrics will bring opportunities for a wide range of innovations that have the potential to dramatically change service industries. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential role service robots will play in the future and to advance a research agenda for service researchers.

This paper uses a conceptual approach that is rooted in the service, robotics and AI literature.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it provides a definition of service robots, describes their key attributes, contrasts their features and capabilities with those of frontline employees, and provides an understanding for which types of service tasks robots will dominate and where humans will dominate. Second, this paper examines consumer perceptions, beliefs and behaviors as related to service robots, and advances the service robot acceptance model. Third, it provides an overview of the ethical questions surrounding robot-delivered services at the individual, market and societal level.

This paper helps service organizations and their management, service robot innovators, programmers and developers, and policymakers better understand the implications of a ubiquitous deployment of service robots.

This is the first conceptual paper that systematically examines key dimensions of robot-delivered frontline service and explores how these will differ in the future.

In an educational landscape fraught with demands and limited finances, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) of teachers are a coveted resource. In this regard, transformational leadership (TL) is often attributed with the achievement of such organizational outcomes. This conceptual essay considers the relationship between teacher culture, teacher OCBs, and TL, arguing that the characteristics of teacher culture predispose those who become teachers to perform OCBs. Furthermore, due to its participatory style, TL may result in either a motivating or de-motivating influence on teacher OCBs depending on the perceived values congruence between teacher culture and leadership goals and behavior. Implications and suggestions for practice are offered.

With the rapid and pervasive introduction of robots into human environments, ethics scholars along with roboticists are asking how ethics can be applied to the discipline of robotics. The purpose of this paper is to provide a concrete example of incorporating ethics into the design process of a robot in healthcare.

The approach for including ethics in the design process of care robots used in this paper is called the Care‐Centered Value Sensitive Design (CCVSD) approach. The CCVSD approach presented here provides both an outline of the components demanding ethical attention as well as a step‐by‐step manner in which such considerations may proceed in a prospective manner throughout the design process of a robot. This begins from the moment of idea generation and continues throughout the design of various prototypes. In this paper, this approach's utility and prospective methodology are illustrated by proposing a novel care robot, the “wee‐bot”, for the collection and testing of urine samples in a hospital context.

The results of applying the CCVSD approach inspired the design of a novel robot for the testing of urine in pediatric oncology patients – the “wee‐bot” robot – and showed that it is possible to successfully incorporate ethics into the design of a care robot by exploring and prescribing design requirements. In other words, the use of the CCVSD approach allowed for the translation of ethical values into technical design requirements as was shown in this paper.

This paper provides a practical solution to the question of how to incorporate ethics into the design of robots and bridges the gap between the work of roboticists and robot ethicists so that they may work together in the design of a novel care robot.

In providing a solution to the issue of how to address ethical issues in the design of robots, the aim is to mitigate issues of societal concern regarding the design, development and implementation of robots in healthcare.

This paper is the first and only presentation of a concrete prospective methodology for including ethics into the design of robots. While the example given here is tailored to the healthcare context, the approach can be adjusted to fit another context and/or robot design.