"Social Robots with AI: Last Call for Robophilosophy", by Johanna Seibt

 

Abstract: Never in its history has philosophy been as socially relevant as today: we are blindly entering the “automation age” (McKinsey) without any reliable means of risk calculation: the creation of intelligent embodied artificial ‘social’ agents, increasingly equipped with generative AI, presents an unprecedented challenge to human self-understanding, and to the depth structure of our socio-cultural realities. Robophilosophy is the comprehensive philosophical response to this unique challenge. As societies begin to embrace the ubiquitous use of social robots, philosophy is saddled with new tasks, that require transfigurations within philosophy. In this lecture Johanna Seibt offers an overview over motivations and core tasks for robophilosophy and illustrates how theoretical and practical disciplines in philosophy can be put to use within interdisciplinary empirical research, but also concretely in the development of responsible (culturally sustainable) applications of social robotics.

 

About: Johanna Seibt is professor for philosophy at the School for Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark. She received her PhD from Pittsburgh, under the supervision of Wilfrid Sellars (and Nicholas Rescher, after Sellars’ death). She taught for 10 years at the University of Texas at Austin, before she moved to Denmark (for personal reasons). For the past 20 years she has been teaching philosophy at Aarhus University. She has two main research areas. In her early work she focused on process ontology. Based on a detailed analysis of substance-ontological presuppositions in contemporary ontology, she developed the foundations for the first analytical process ontology (General Process Theory), including a non-standard mereological framework (“Leveled Mereology”) to articulate part-whole relationships among processes. She investigated how her new category of “dynamics” or “general processes” can be applied for the ontological interpretation of free field quanta (in quantum field theory) and biological individuals. Since 2012 she has focused her interests on the philosophy of social robotics. Together with her colleagues (especially Marco Nørskov) she introduced in 2014 the field of robophilosophy, which she defined as “philosophy of, for, and by social robotics”. She is the founder and director of the Research Unit for Robophilosophy and Integrative Social Robotics (RISR), www.robophilosophy.org. Since 2012 this research unit has conducted wide-scope interdisciplinary HRI research--involving over 35 researchers from 11 disciplines and 9 countries—and developed the approach of “Integrative Social Robotics” (ISR). ISR is a new 'paradigm' for the organization of RD&D (Research, Design, and Development) processes in social robotics that centrally includes Humanities expertise. She is the main organizer of the Robophilosophy Conference Series, www.robophiloophy-conference.org, which features the world’s largest events for Humanities research in and on social robotics.