​Panel

"Bonding.exe: The Future of Human-Machine Relationships" 

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February 5, 2026, 15.35-16.35

Hotel Papendal, Arnhem

Room 4

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Due to recent developments in AI (such as enhanced memory capacities and machine’s advanced ability to mimic human communication), long-term interactions with machines are becoming increasingly natural. As a result, more and more people are having 'relationships' (e.g., superficial, friendly, intimate, romantic) with social machines like chatbots, virtual humans and robots. However, human-machine relationships are not the same as human-human relationships. For instance, the machine partner of this relationship is always motivated to serve, please and endear itself to the human partner, without being able to willingly abandon or genuinely feel emotions toward the human partner – which causes inherently imbalanced relationships to be formed.This leads to various questions, like 'How can we define relationships, in the context of human-machine interactions?', 'How do we experience the termination of our relationships with machines?', and 'How does bonding to a machine partner change us?” We currently do not have an adequate amount of evidence to answer these questions empirically, and therefore, this panel aims to stimulate the audience (and the panelists) into thinking about human-machine relationships at a more conceptual level, with an interdisciplinary approach to figure out what makes modern human-machine relationships different than human-human relationships. In this panel, these questions are discussed in three blocks of interactive discussions with renowned experts from different fields.

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Invited panelists:

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• Elly Konijn (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
   

• Ruud Hortensius (Universiteit Utrecht)
   

• Chris Starke (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

The first block will focus on defining relationships to answer what is the bare minimum required to call a prolonged association a “social relationship”. Prof. Dr. Elly Konijn from VU, author of the Theory of Affective Bonding, will be the expert panelist for this block.

 

The second block will focus on how machines can form and maintain different relationship roles within social circles, such as families with young children. Dr. Ruud Hortensius from Utrecht University will be the main panelist of this block with his expertise on the integration of smart assistants in young families.

 

The third block will focus on how a machine partner’s algorithmic tendencies would affect the emotions, cognitions, and behaviors of a human partner. Assist. Prof. Dr. Chris Starke from the University of Amsterdam, who is the main author of the manuscript that defined synthetic relationships, will be the main panelist of this block. As his research is more focused on the political aspect of human-machine communication, the third block will emphasize the impact of sycophancy the most (i.e., AI chatbot’s algorithmic inclinations to agree with the user to satisfy them).

As this panel is planned as an interactive discussion of synthetic relationships, we also invite audiences from all backgrounds to provide insight into this discussion. So that we can move through these uncharted topics by communicating with each other, as researchers with various expertise and as individuals with assorted experiences.