Robot ethicist and MIT Media Lab researcher Dr. Kate Darling will deliver a timely keynote address at Sensors Converge June 28 regarding, “The Future of Human-Robot Interaction.”
The address will follow the recent release of her book, “The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots.”
In recent columns and podcasts since the book’s publication, she has described how humans have related to animals for centuries especially in the workplace, from plowing fields to help grow food to sending canaries into coal mines to detect deadly gases. In similar ways, robots of the future can be seen as partners to humans, augmenting work and other tasks, she believes.
“We should focus on the ways [AI] can help and support people,” she wrote recently in ScienceFocus. The article was also partly a response to concerns that robots will take jobs from people, or, in theory, threaten the human race as superior sentient beings. It was entitled, “It’s time to accept AI will never think like a human—and that’s okay.”
Elsewhere in ScienceFocus she said, “One of the best use cases for robots generally is to take on important tasks that are dangerous for human beings, whether that’s bomb inspection, handling nuclear waste or lifting heavy boxes in factories. Technology is a tool in our arsenal that can help alleviate suffering on the job.”
The theme of robots augmenting humans instead of replacing humans is not new, but Darling approaches the concepts with both a legal and academic background. Robots are already deployed in manufacturing, sometimes to weld metal or lift and transport heavy objects. So far, robots have not taken control of an entire assembly line, she noted.
“It’s important we expand on the definition [of robots] influenced by pop culture of these quasi-human metal machines,” she said on a recent Owltail podcast.
An important distinction is that humans have common sense and can deal with uncertainty, meaning there continues to be a place for human workers on assembly lines. “We have to think more creatively about labor in general,” she argued.
Dr. Kate Darling spoke at The Aspen Ideas Festival in 2017. It’s interesting to note how ethical issues around robots may or may not have changed over the past five years.
Editor’s Note: Dr. Darling will speak June 28 in San Jose as part of a full schedule of conference sessions and exhibits at Sensors Converge from June 27-29. Registration is online.