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Advancements in Humanoid Robots: A Comprehensive Review and Future Prospects

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NEWS FEATURE
28 May 2024
Correction 31 May 2024

The AI revolution is coming to robots: how will it change them?

Elizabeth Gibney

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Humanoid robots developed by the US company Figure use OpenAI programming for language and vision. Credit: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong/Alamy

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For a generation of scientists raised watching Star Wars, there’s a disappointing lack of C-3PO-like droids wandering around our cities and homes. Where are the humanoid robots fuelled with common sense that can help around the house and workplace?

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might be set to fill that hole. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we are the last generation for which those sci-fi scenes are not a reality,” says Alexander Khazatsky, a machine-learning and robotics researcher at Stanford University in California.

From OpenAI to Google DeepMind, almost every big technology firm with AI expertise is now working on bringing the versatile learning algorithms that power chatbots, known as foundation models, to robotics. The idea is to imbue robots with common-sense knowledge, letting them tackle a wide range of tasks. Many researchers think that robots could become really good, really fast. “We believe we are at the point of a step change in robotics,” says Gerard Andrews, a marketing manager focused on robotics at technology company Nvidia in Santa Clara, California, which in March launched a general-purpose AI model designed for humanoid robots.

At the same time, robots could help to improve AI. Many researchers hope that bringing an embodied experience to AI training could take them closer to the dream of ‘artificial general intelligence’ — AI that has human-like cognitive abilities across any task . “The last step to true intelligence has to be physical intelligence,” says Akshara Rai, an AI researcher at Meta in Menlo Park, California.

But although many researchers are excited about the latest injection of AI into robotics, they also caution that some of the more impressive demonstrations are just that — demonstrations, often by companies that are eager to generate buzz. It can be a long road from demonstration to deployment, says Rodney Brooks, a roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, whose company iRobot invented the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner.

There are plenty of hurdles on this road, including scraping together enough of the right data for robots to learn from, dealing with temperamental hardware and tackling concerns about safety. Foundation models for robotics “should be explored”, says Harold Soh, a specialist in human–robot interactions at the National University of Singapore. But he is sceptical, he says, that this strategy will lead to the revolution in robotics that some researchers predict.

Firm foundations

The term robot covers a wide range of automated devices, from the robotic arms widely used in manufacturing, to self-driving cars and drones used in warfare and rescue missions. Most incorporate some sort of AI — to recognize objects, for example. But they are also programmed to carry out specific tasks, work in particular environments or rely on some level of human supervision, says Joyce Sidopoulos, co-founder of MassRobotics, an innovation hub for robotics companies in Boston, Massachusetts. Even Atlas — a robot made by Boston Dynamics, a robotics company in Waltham, Massachusetts, which famously showed off its parkour skills in 2018 — works by carefully mapping its environment and choosing the best actions to execute from a library of built-in templates.

For most AI researchers branching into robotics, the goal is to create something much more autonomous and adaptable across a wider range of circumstances. This might start with robot arms that can ‘pick and place’ any factory product, but evolve into humanoid robots that provide company and support for older people , for example. “There are so many applications,” says Sidopoulos.

The human form is complicated and not always optimized for specific physical tasks, but it has the huge benefit of being perfectly suited to the world that people have built. A human-shaped robot would be able to physically interact with the world in much the same way that a person does.

However, controlling any robot — let alone a human-shaped one — is incredibly hard. Apparently simple tasks, such as opening a door, are actually hugely complex, requiring a robot to understand how different door mechanisms work, how much force to apply to a handle and how to maintain balance while doing so. The real world is extremely varied and constantly changing.

The approach now gathering steam is to control a robot using the same type of AI foundation models that power image generators and chatbots such as ChatGPT. These models use brain-inspired neural networks to learn from huge swathes of generic data. They build associations between elements of their training data and, when asked for an output, tap these connections to generate appropriate words or images, often with uncannily good results.

Likewise, a robot foundation model is trained on text and images from the Internet, providing it with information about the nature of various objects and their contexts. It also learns from examples of robotic operations. It can be trained, for example, on videos of robot trial and error, or videos of robots that are being remotely operated by humans, alongside the instructions that pair with those actions. A trained robot foundation model can then observe a scenario and use its learnt associations to predict what action will lead to the best outcome.

Google DeepMind has built one of the most advanced robotic foundation models, known as Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2), that can operate a mobile robot arm built by its sister company Everyday Robots in Mountain View, California. Like other robotic foundation models, it was trained on both the Internet and videos of robotic operation. Thanks to the online training, RT-2 can follow instructions even when those commands go beyond what the robot has seen another robot do before 1 . For example, it can move a drink can onto a picture of Taylor Swift when asked to do so — even though Swift’s image was not in any of the 130,000 demonstrations that RT-2 had been trained on.

In other words, knowledge gleaned from Internet trawling (such as what the singer Taylor Swift looks like) is being carried over into the robot’s actions. “A lot of Internet concepts just transfer,” says Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, an AI and robotics researcher at Google DeepMind in San Francisco, California. This radically reduces the amount of physical data that a robot needs to have absorbed to cope in different situations, she says.

But to fully understand the basics of movements and their consequences, robots still need to learn from lots of physical data. And therein lies a problem.

Data dearth

Although chatbots are being trained on billions of words from the Internet, there is no equivalently large data set for robotic activity. This lack of data has left robotics “in the dust”, says Khazatsky.

Pooling data is one way around this. Khazatsky and his colleagues have created DROID 2 , an open-source data set that brings together around 350 hours of video data from one type of robot arm (the Franka Panda 7DoF robot arm, built by Franka Robotics in Munich, Germany), as it was being remotely operated by people in 18 laboratories around the world. The robot-eye-view camera has recorded visual data in hundreds of environments, including bathrooms, laundry rooms, bedrooms and kitchens. This diversity helps robots to perform well on tasks with previously unencountered elements, says Khazatsky.

The Google DeepMind robotic arm RT-2 holding a toy dinosaur up off a table with a wide array of objects on it

When prompted to ‘pick up extinct animal’, Google’s RT-2 model selects the dinosaur figurine from a crowded table. Credit: Google DeepMind

Gopalakrishnan is part of a collaboration of more than a dozen academic labs that is also bringing together robotic data, in its case from a diversity of robot forms, from single arms to quadrupeds. The collaborators’ theory is that learning about the physical world in one robot body should help an AI to operate another — in the same way that learning in English can help a language model to generate Chinese, because the underlying concepts about the world that the words describe are the same. This seems to work. The collaboration’s resulting foundation model, called RT-X, which was released in October 2023 3 , performed better on real-world tasks than did models the researchers trained on one robot architecture.

Many researchers say that having this kind of diversity is essential. “We believe that a true robotics foundation model should not be tied to only one embodiment,” says Peter Chen, an AI researcher and co-founder of Covariant, an AI firm in Emeryville, California.

Covariant is also working hard on scaling up robot data. The company, which was set up in part by former OpenAI researchers, began collecting data in 2018 from 30 variations of robot arms in warehouses across the world, which all run using Covariant software. Covariant’s Robotics Foundation Model 1 (RFM-1) goes beyond collecting video data to encompass sensor readings, such as how much weight was lifted or force applied. This kind of data should help a robot to perform tasks such as manipulating a squishy object, says Gopalakrishnan — in theory, helping a robot to know, for example, how not to bruise a banana.

Covariant has built up a proprietary database that includes hundreds of billions of ‘tokens’ — units of real-world robotic information — which Chen says is roughly on a par with the scale of data that trained GPT-3, the 2020 version of OpenAI's large language model. “We have way more real-world data than other people, because that’s what we have been focused on,” Chen says. RFM-1 is poised to roll out soon, says Chen, and should allow operators of robots running Covariant’s software to type or speak general instructions, such as “pick up apples from the bin”.

Another way to access large databases of movement is to focus on a humanoid robot form so that an AI can learn by watching videos of people — of which there are billions online. Nvidia’s Project GR00T foundation model, for example, is ingesting videos of people performing tasks, says Andrews. Although copying humans has huge potential for boosting robot skills, doing so well is hard, says Gopalakrishnan. For example, robot videos generally come with data about context and commands — the same isn’t true for human videos, she says.

Virtual reality

A final and promising way to find limitless supplies of physical data, researchers say, is through simulation. Many roboticists are working on building 3D virtual-reality environments, the physics of which mimic the real world, and then wiring those up to a robotic brain for training. Simulators can churn out huge quantities of data and allow humans and robots to interact virtually, without risk, in rare or dangerous situations, all without wearing out the mechanics. “If you had to get a farm of robotic hands and exercise them until they achieve [a high] level of dexterity, you will blow the motors,” says Nvidia’s Andrews.

But making a good simulator is a difficult task. “Simulators have good physics, but not perfect physics, and making diverse simulated environments is almost as hard as just collecting diverse data,” says Khazatsky.

Meta and Nvidia are both betting big on simulation to scale up robot data, and have built sophisticated simulated worlds: Habitat from Meta and Isaac Sim from Nvidia. In them, robots gain the equivalent of years of experience in a few hours, and, in trials, they then successfully apply what they have learnt to situations they have never encountered in the real world. “Simulation is an extremely powerful but underrated tool in robotics, and I am excited to see it gaining momentum,” says Rai.

Many researchers are optimistic that foundation models will help to create general-purpose robots that can replace human labour. In February, Figure, a robotics company in Sunnyvale, California, raised US$675 million in investment for its plan to use language and vision models developed by OpenAI in its general-purpose humanoid robot. A demonstration video shows a robot giving a person an apple in response to a general request for ‘something to eat’. The video on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) has racked up 4.8 million views.

Exactly how this robot’s foundation model has been trained, along with any details about its performance across various settings, is unclear (neither OpenAI nor Figure responded to Nature ’s requests for an interview). Such demos should be taken with a pinch of salt, says Soh. The environment in the video is conspicuously sparse, he says. Adding a more complex environment could potentially confuse the robot — in the same way that such environments have fooled self-driving cars. “Roboticists are very sceptical of robot videos for good reason, because we make them and we know that out of 100 shots, there’s usually only one that works,” Soh says.

Hurdles ahead

As the AI research community forges ahead with robotic brains, many of those who actually build robots caution that the hardware also presents a challenge: robots are complicated and break a lot. Hardware has been advancing, Chen says, but “a lot of people looking at the promise of foundation models just don't know the other side of how difficult it is to deploy these types of robots”, he says.

Another issue is how far robot foundation models can get using the visual data that make up the vast majority of their physical training. Robots might need reams of other kinds of sensory data, for example from the sense of touch or proprioception — a sense of where their body is in space — say Soh. Those data sets don’t yet exist. “There’s all this stuff that’s missing, which I think is required for things like a humanoid to work efficiently in the world,” he says.

Releasing foundation models into the real world comes with another major challenge — safety. In the two years since they started proliferating, large language models have been shown to come up with false and biased information. They can also be tricked into doing things that they are programmed not to do, such as telling users how to make a bomb. Giving AI systems a body brings these types of mistake and threat to the physical world. “If a robot is wrong, it can actually physically harm you or break things or cause damage,” says Gopalakrishnan.

Valuable work going on in AI safety will transfer to the world of robotics, says Gopalakrishnan. In addition, her team has imbued some robot AI models with rules that layer on top of their learning, such as not to even attempt tasks that involve interacting with people, animals or other living organisms. “Until we have confidence in robots, we will need a lot of human supervision,” she says.

Despite the risks, there is a lot of momentum in using AI to improve robots — and using robots to improve AI. Gopalakrishnan thinks that hooking up AI brains to physical robots will improve the foundation models, for example giving them better spatial reasoning. Meta, says Rai, is among those pursuing the hypothesis that “true intelligence can only emerge when an agent can interact with its world”. That real-world interaction, some say, is what could take AI beyond learning patterns and making predictions, to truly understanding and reasoning about the world.

What the future holds depends on who you ask. Brooks says that robots will continue to improve and find new applications, but their eventual use “is nowhere near as sexy” as humanoids replacing human labour. But others think that developing a functional and safe humanoid robot that is capable of cooking dinner, running errands and folding the laundry is possible — but could just cost hundreds of millions of dollars. “I’m sure someone will do it,” says Khazatsky. “It’ll just be a lot of money, and time.”

Nature 630 , 22-24 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01442-5

Updates & Corrections

Correction 31 May 2024 : An earlier version of this feature gave the wrong name for Nvidia’s simulated world.

Brohan, A. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.15818 (2023).

Khazatsky, A. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.12945 (2024).

Open X-Embodiment Collaboration et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.08864 (2023).

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Ieee spectrum, follow ieee spectrum, support ieee spectrum, enjoy more free content and benefits by creating an account, saving articles to read later requires an ieee spectrum account, the institute content is only available for members, downloading full pdf issues is exclusive for ieee members, downloading this e-book is exclusive for ieee members, access to spectrum 's digital edition is exclusive for ieee members, following topics is a feature exclusive for ieee members, adding your response to an article requires an ieee spectrum account, create an account to access more content and features on ieee spectrum , including the ability to save articles to read later, download spectrum collections, and participate in conversations with readers and editors. for more exclusive content and features, consider joining ieee ., join the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to all of spectrum’s articles, archives, pdf downloads, and other benefits. learn more →, join the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to this e-book plus all of ieee spectrum’s articles, archives, pdf downloads, and other benefits. learn more →, access thousands of articles — completely free, create an account and get exclusive content and features: save articles, download collections, and talk to tech insiders — all free for full access and benefits, join ieee as a paying member., the uncanny valley: the original essay by masahiro mori, “the uncanny valley” by masahiro mori is an influential essay in robotics. this is the first english translation authorized by mori..

Translated by Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki

Editor's note: More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, then a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay on how he envisioned people's reactions to robots that looked and acted almost human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person's response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. This descent into eeriness is known as the uncanny valley . The essay appeared in an obscure Japanese journal called Energy in 1970, and in subsequent years it received almost no attention. More recently, however, the concept of the uncanny valley has rapidly attracted interest in robotics and other scientific circles as well as in popular culture. Some researchers have explored its implications for human-robot interaction and computer-graphics animation, while others have investigated its biological and social roots. Now interest in the uncanny valley should only intensify, as technology evolves and researchers build robots that look increasingly human. Though copies of Mori's essay have circulated among researchers, a complete version hasn't been widely available. This is the first publication of an English translation that has been authorized and reviewed by Mori. [ Read an exclusive interview with him .]

A version of this article originally appeared in the June 2012 issue of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine .

A Valley in One's Sense of Affinity

The mathematical term monotonically increasing function describes a relation in which the function y = ƒ( x ) increases continuously with the variable x . For example, as effort x grows, income y increases, or as a car's accelerator is pressed, the car moves faster. This kind of relation is ubiquitous and very easily understood. In fact, because such monotonically increasing functions cover most phenomena of everyday life, people may fall under the illusion that they represent all relations. Also attesting to this false impression is the fact that many people struggle through life by persistently pushing without understanding the effectiveness of pulling back. That is why people usually are puzzled when faced with some phenomenon this function cannot represent.

An example of a function that does not increase continuously is climbing a mountain—the relation between the distance ( x) a hiker has traveled toward the summit and the hiker's altitude ( y) —owing to the intervening hills and valleys. I have noticed that, in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley (Figure 1), which I call the uncanny valley .

Nowadays, industrial robots are increasingly recognized as the driving force behind reductions in factory personnel. However, as is well known, these robots just extend, contract, and rotate their arms; without faces or legs, they do not look very human. Their design policy is clearly based on functionality. From this standpoint, the robots must perform functions similar to those of human factory workers, but whether they look similar does not matter. Thus, given their lack of resemblance to human beings, in general, people hardly feel any affinity for them. 1 If we plot the industrial robot on a graph of affinity versus human likeness, it lies near the origin in Figure 1.

By contrast, a toy robot's designer may focus more on the robot's appearance than its functions. Consequently, despite its being a sturdy mechanical figure, the robot will start to have a roughly human-looking external form with a face, two arms, two legs, and a torso. Children seem to feel deeply attached to these toy robots. Hence, the toy robot is shown halfway up the first hill in Figure 1.

Since creating an artificial human is itself one of the objectives of robotics, various efforts are underway to build humanlike robots. 2 For example, a robot's arm may be composed of a metal cylinder with many bolts, but by covering it with skin and adding a bit of fleshy plumpness, we can achieve a more humanlike appearance. As a result, we naturally respond to it with a heightened sense of affinity.

Many of our readers have experience interacting with persons with physical disabilities, and all must have felt sympathy for those missing a hand or leg and wearing a prosthetic limb. Recently, owing to great advances in fabrication technology, we cannot distinguish at a glance a prosthetic hand from a real one. Some models simulate wrinkles, veins, fingernails, and even fingerprints. Though similar to a real hand, the prosthetic hand's color is pinker, as if it had just come out of the bath.

One might say that the prosthetic hand has achieved a degree of resemblance to the human form, perhaps on a par with false teeth. However, when we realize the hand, which at first site looked real, is in fact artificial, we experience an eerie sensation. For example, we could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its texture and coldness. When this happens, we lose our sense of affinity, and the hand becomes uncanny. In mathematical terms, this can be represented by a negative value. Therefore, in this case, the appearance of the prosthetic hand is quite humanlike, but the level of affinity is negative, thus placing the hand near the bottom of the valley in Figure 1. This example illustrates the uncanny valley phenomenon.

I don't think that, on close inspection, a bunraku puppet appears very similar to a human being. Its realism in terms of size, skin texture, and so on, does not even reach that of a realistic prosthetic hand. But when we enjoy a puppet show in the theater, we are seated at a certain distance from the stage. The puppet's absolute size is ignored, and its total appearance, including hand and eye movements, is close to that of a human being. So, given our tendency as an audience to become absorbed in this form of art, we might feel a high level of affinity for the puppet.

From the preceding discussion, the readers should be able to understand the concept of the uncanny valley. So now let us consider in more detail the relation between the uncanny valley and movement.

The Effect of Movement

Movement is fundamental to animals—including human beings—and thus to robots as well. Its presence changes the shape of the uncanny valley graph by amplifying the peaks and valleys, as shown in Figure 2. For point of illustration, when an industrial robot is switched off, it is just a greasy machine. But once the robot is programmed to move its gripper like a human hand, we start to feel a certain level of affinity for it. (In this case, the velocity, acceleration, and deceleration must approximate human movement.) Conversely, when a prosthetic hand that is near the bottom of the uncanny valley starts to move, our sensation of eeriness intensifies.

Some readers may know that recent technology has enabled prosthetic hands to extend and contract their fingers automatically. The best commercially available model, shown in Figure 3, was developed in Vienna. To explain how it works, even if a person's forearm is missing, the intention to move the fingers produces a faint current in the arm muscles, which can be detected by an electromyogram. When the prosthetic hand detects the current by means of electrodes on the skin's surface, it amplifies the signal to activate a small motor that moves its fingers. Because this myoelectric hand makes movements, it could make healthy people feel uneasy. If someone wearing the hand in a dark place shook a woman's hand with it, the woman would assuredly shriek!

Since negative effects of movement are apparent even with a prosthetic hand, a whole robot would magnify the creepiness. And that is just one robot. Imagine a craftsman being awakened suddenly in the dead of night. He searches downstairs for something among a crowd of mannequins in his workshop. If the mannequins started to move, it would be like a horror story.

Movement-related effects could be observed at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan. Plans for the event had prompted the construction of robots with some highly sophisticated designs. For example, one robot had 29 pairs of artificial muscles in the face (the same number as a human being) to make it smile in a humanlike fashion. According to the designer, a smile is a dynamic sequence of facial deformations, and the speed of the deformations is crucial. When the speed is cut in half in an attempt to make the robot bring up a smile more slowly, instead of looking happy, its expression turns creepy. This shows how, because of a variation in movement, something that has come to appear very close to human—like a robot, puppet, or prosthetic hand—could easily tumble down into the uncanny valley.

Escape by Design

We hope to design and build robots and prosthetic hands that will not fall into the uncanny valley. Thus, because of the risk inherent in trying to increase their degree of human likeness to scale the second peak, I recommend that designers instead take the first peak as their goal, which results in a moderate degree of human likeness and a considerable sense of affinity. In fact, I predict it is possible to create a safe level of affinity by deliberately pursuing a nonhuman design. I ask designers to ponder this. To illustrate the principle, consider eyeglasses. Eyeglasses do not resemble real eyeballs, but one could say that their design has created a charming pair of new eyes. So we should follow the same principle in designing prosthetic hands. In doing so, instead of pitiful looking realistic hands, stylish ones would likely become fashionable.

As another example, consider this model of a human hand created by a woodcarver who sculpts statues of Buddhas (Figure 4). The fingers bend freely at the joints. The hand lacks fingerprints, and it retains the natural color of the wood, but its roundness and beautiful curves do not elicit any eerie sensation. Perhaps this wooden hand could also serve as a reference for design.

An Explanation of the Uncanny

As healthy persons, we are represented at the crest of the second peak in Figure 2 (moving). Then when we die, we are, of course, unable to move; the body goes cold, and the face becomes pale. Therefore, our death can be regarded as a movement from the second peak (moving) to the bottom of the uncanny valley (still), as indicated by the arrow's path in Figure 2. We might be glad this arrow leads down into the still valley of the corpse and not the valley animated by the living dead!

I think this descent explains the secret lying deep beneath the uncanny valley. Why were we equipped with this eerie sensation? Is it essential for human beings? I have not yet considered these questions deeply, but I have no doubt it is an integral part of our instinct for self-preservation. 3

We should begin to build an accurate map of the uncanny valley, so that through robotics research we can come to understand what makes us human. This map is also necessary to enable us to create—using nonhuman designs—devices to which people can relate comfortably.

1 However, industrial robots are considerably closer in appearance to humans than machinery in general, especially in their arms. [ back to text ↑]

2 Others believe that the true appeal of robots is their potential to exceed and augment humans. [ back to text ↑]

3 The sense of eeriness is probably a form of instinct that protects us from proximal, rather than distal, sources of danger. Proximal sources of danger are corpses, members of different species, and other entities we can closely approach. Distal sources of danger include windstorms and floods. [ back to text ↑]

Images used with permission from M. Mori, “The Uncanny Valley," Energy , vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 33–35, 1970 (in Japanese).

About the translators:

Karl F. MacDorman is an associate professor of human computer interaction at the School of Informatics, Indiana University . His research interests include android science, machine learning, social robotics, and computational neuroscience.

Norri Kageki is a journalist who writes about robots. She is originally from Tokyo and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the publisher of GetRobo and also writes for various publications in the United States and Japan.

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Title: ai robots and humanoid ai: review, perspectives and directions.

Abstract: In the approximately century-long journey of robotics, humanoid robots made their debut around six decades ago. The rapid advancements in generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and large multimodal models (LMMs) have reignited interest in humanoids, steering them towards real-time, interactive, and multimodal designs and applications. This resurgence unveils boundless opportunities for AI robotics and novel applications, paving the way for automated, real-time and humane interactions with humanoid advisers, educators, medical professionals, caregivers, and receptionists. However, while current humanoid robots boast human-like appearances, they have yet to embody true humaneness, remaining distant from achieving human-like intelligence. In our comprehensive review, we delve into the intricate landscape of AI robotics and AI humanoid robots in particular, exploring the challenges, perspectives and directions in transitioning from human-looking to humane humanoids and fostering human-like robotics. This endeavour synergizes the advancements in LLMs, LMMs, generative AI, and human-level AI with humanoid robotics, omniverse, and decentralized AI, ushering in the era of AI humanoids and humanoid AI.

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Human-Humanoid Interaction and Cooperation: a Review

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Luigi Penco ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2938-2546 1 ,
Waldez Gomes ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2506-8189 1 ,
Yang You 1 ,
Salvatore Maria Anzalone 3 ,
Pauline Maurice 1 ,
Vincent Thomas 1 &
Serena Ivaldi ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5349-9835 1

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Purpose of Review

Humanoid robots are versatile platforms with the potential to assist humans in several domains, from education to healthcare, from entertainment to the factory of the future. To find their place into our daily life, where complex interactions and collaborations with humans are expected, their social and physical interaction skills need to be further improved.

Recent Findings

The hallmark of humanoids is their anthropomorphic shape, which facilitates the interaction but at the same time increases the expectations of the human in terms of advanced cooperation capabilities. Cooperation with humans requires an appropriate modeling and real-time estimation of the human state and intention. This information is required both at a high level by the cooperative decision-making policy and at a low level by the interaction controller that implements the physical interaction. Real-time constraints induce simplified models that limit the decision capabilities of the robot during cooperation.

In this article, we review the current achievements in the context of human-humanoid interaction and cooperation. We report on the cognitive and cooperation skills that the robot needs to help humans achieve their goals, and how these high-level skills translate into the robot’s low-level control commands. Finally, we report on the applications of humanoid robots as humans’ companions, co-workers, or avatars.

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Human-Humanoid Interaction: Overview

Applications in HHI: Physical Cooperation

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This work was supported by the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under Grant Agreement No. 731540 (project AnDy), the European Research Council (ERC) under Grant Agreement No. 637972 (project ResiBots), the French Agency for Research under the ANR Grants No. ANR-18-CE33-0001 (project Flying Co-Worker) and ANR-20-CE33-0004 (project ROOIBOS), the ANR-FNS Grant No. ANR-19-CE19-0029 - FNS 200021E_189475/1 (project iReCheck), the CHIST-ERA grant HEAP (CHIST-ERA-17-ORMR-003), the Inria-DGA grant (“humanoïdeïde résilient”ésilient”), and the Inria “ADT” wbCub/wbTorque.

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Vianello, L., Penco, L., Gomes, W. et al. Human-Humanoid Interaction and Cooperation: a Review. Curr Robot Rep 2 , 441–454 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43154-021-00068-z

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s43154-021-00068-z

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Humanoid Robotics

Humanoid robotics is an emerging and challenging research field, which has received significant attention during the past years and will continue to play a central role in robotics research and in many applications of the 21st century. Regardless of the application area, one of the common problems tackled in humanoid robotics is the understanding of human-like information processing and the underlying mechanisms of the human brain in dealing with the real world.

Ambitious goals have been set for future humanoid robotics. They are expected to serve as companions and assistants for humans in daily life and as ultimate helpers in man-made and natural disasters. In 2050, a team of humanoid robots soccer players shall win against the winner of most recent World Cup. DARPA announced recently the next Grand Challenge in robotics: building robots which do things like humans in a world made for humans.

Considerable progress has been made in humanoid research resulting in a number of humanoid robots able to move and perform well-designed tasks. Over the past decade in humanoid research, an encouraging spectrum of science and technology has emerged that leads to the development of highly advanced humanoid mechatronic systems endowed with rich and complex sensorimotor capabilities. Of major importance for advances of the field is without doubt the availability of reproducible humanoid robots systems, which have been used in the last years as common hardware and software platforms to support humanoids research. Many technical innovations and remarkable results by universities, research institutions and companies are visible.

The major activities of the TC are reflected by the firmly established annual IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, which is the internationally recognized prime event of the humanoid robotics community. The conference is sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. The level of interest in humanoid robotics research continues to grow, which is evidenced by the increasing number of submitted papers to this conference. For more information, please visit the official website of the Humanoids TC: http://www.humanoid-robotics.org

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Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Robots — Humanoid Robots: Planning, Sensors and Control

Humanoid Robots: Planning, Sensors and Control

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Planning and control, exteroceptive sensors, proprioceptive sensors.

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The WIRED Guide to Robots

Modern robots are not unlike toddlers: It’s hilarious to watch them fall over, but deep down we know that if we laugh too hard, they might develop a complex and grow up to start World War III. None of humanity’s creations inspires such a confusing mix of awe, admiration, and fear: We want robots to make our lives easier and safer, yet we can’t quite bring ourselves to trust them. We’re crafting them in our own image, yet we are terrified they’ll supplant us.

But that trepidation is no obstacle to the booming field of robotics. Robots have finally grown smart enough and physically capable enough to make their way out of factories and labs to walk and roll and even leap among us . The machines have arrived.

You may be worried a robot is going to steal your job, and we get that. This is capitalism, after all, and automation is inevitable. But you may be more likely to work alongside a robot in the near future than have one replace you. And even better news: You’re more likely to make friends with a robot than have one murder you. Hooray for the future!

The Complete History And Future of Robots

The definition of “robot” has been confusing from the very beginning. The word first appeared in 1921, in Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. , or Rossum's Universal Robots. “Robot” comes from the Czech for “forced labor.” These robots were robots more in spirit than form, though. They looked like humans, and instead of being made of metal, they were made of chemical batter. The robots were far more efficient than their human counterparts, and also way more murder-y—they ended up going on a killing spree .

R.U.R. would establish the trope of the Not-to-Be-Trusted Machine (e.g., Terminator , The Stepford Wives , Blade Runner , etc.) that continues to this day—which is not to say pop culture hasn’t embraced friendlier robots. Think Rosie from The Jetsons . (Ornery, sure, but certainly not homicidal.) And it doesn’t get much family-friendlier than Robin Williams as Bicentennial Man .

The real-world definition of “robot” is just as slippery as those fictional depictions. Ask 10 roboticists and you’ll get 10 answers—how autonomous does it need to be, for instance. But they do agree on some general guidelines : A robot is an intelligent, physically embodied machine. A robot can perform tasks autonomously to some degree. And a robot can sense and manipulate its environment.

Think of a simple drone that you pilot around. That’s no robot. But give a drone the power to take off and land on its own and sense objects and suddenly it’s a lot more robot-ish. It’s the intelligence and sensing and autonomy that’s key.

But it wasn’t until the 1960s that a company built something that started meeting those guidelines. That’s when SRI International in Silicon Valley developed Shakey , the first truly mobile and perceptive robot. This tower on wheels was well-named—awkward, slow, twitchy. Equipped with a camera and bump sensors, Shakey could navigate a complex environment. It wasn’t a particularly confident-looking machine, but it was the beginning of the robotic revolution.

Around the time Shakey was trembling about, robot arms were beginning to transform manufacturing. The first among them was Unimate , which welded auto bodies. Today, its descendants rule car factories, performing tedious, dangerous tasks with far more precision and speed than any human could muster. Even though they’re stuck in place, they still very much fit our definition of a robot—they’re intelligent machines that sense and manipulate their environment.

Robots, though, remained largely confined to factories and labs, where they either rolled about or were stuck in place lifting objects. Then, in the mid-1980s Honda started up a humanoid robotics program. It developed P3, which could walk pretty darn good and also wave and shake hands, much to the delight of a roomful of suits . The work would culminate in Asimo, the famed biped, which once tried to take out President Obama with a well-kicked soccer ball. (OK, perhaps it was more innocent than that.)

Today, advanced robots are popping up everywhere . For that you can thank three technologies in particular: sensors, actuators, and AI.

So, sensors. Machines that roll on sidewalks to deliver falafel can only navigate our world thanks in large part to the 2004 Darpa Grand Challenge, in which teams of roboticists cobbled together self-driving cars to race through the desert. Their secret? Lidar, which shoots out lasers to build a 3-D map of the world. The ensuing private-sector race to develop self-driving cars has dramatically driven down the price of lidar, to the point that engineers can create perceptive robots on the (relative) cheap.

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Lidar is often combined with something called machine vision—2-D or 3-D cameras that allow the robot to build an even better picture of its world. You know how Facebook automatically recognizes your mug and tags you in pictures? Same principle with robots. Fancy algorithms allow them to pick out certain landmarks or objects .

Sensors are what keep robots from smashing into things. They’re why a robot mule of sorts can keep an eye on you, following you and schlepping your stuff around ; machine vision also allows robots to scan cherry trees to determine where best to shake them , helping fill massive labor gaps in agriculture.

New technologies promise to let robots sense the world in ways that are far beyond humans’ capabilities. We’re talking about seeing around corners: At MIT, researchers have developed a system that watches the floor at the corner of, say, a hallway, and picks out subtle movements being reflected from the other side that the piddling human eye can’t see. Such technology could one day ensure that robots don’t crash into humans in labyrinthine buildings, and even allow self-driving cars to see occluded scenes.

Within each of these robots is the next secret ingredient: the actuator , which is a fancy word for the combo electric motor and gearbox that you’ll find in a robot’s joint. It’s this actuator that determines how strong a robot is and how smoothly or not smoothly it moves . Without actuators, robots would crumple like rag dolls. Even relatively simple robots like Roombas owe their existence to actuators. Self-driving cars, too, are loaded with the things.

Actuators are great for powering massive robot arms on a car assembly line, but a newish field, known as soft robotics, is devoted to creating actuators that operate on a whole new level. Unlike mule robots, soft robots are generally squishy, and use air or oil to get themselves moving. So for instance, one particular kind of robot muscle uses electrodes to squeeze a pouch of oil, expanding and contracting to tug on weights . Unlike with bulky traditional actuators, you could stack a bunch of these to magnify the strength: A robot named Kengoro, for instance, moves with 116 actuators that tug on cables, allowing the machine to do unsettlingly human maneuvers like pushups . It’s a far more natural-looking form of movement than what you’d get with traditional electric motors housed in the joints.

And then there’s Boston Dynamics, which created the Atlas humanoid robot for the Darpa Robotics Challenge in 2013. At first, university robotics research teams struggled to get the machine to tackle the basic tasks of the original 2013 challenge and the finals round in 2015, like turning valves and opening doors. But Boston Dynamics has since that time turned Atlas into a marvel that can do backflips , far outpacing other bipeds that still have a hard time walking. (Unlike the Terminator, though, it does not pack heat.) Boston Dynamics has also begun leasing a quadruped robot called Spot, which can recover in unsettling fashion when humans kick or tug on it . That kind of stability will be key if we want to build a world where we don’t spend all our time helping robots out of jams. And it’s all thanks to the humble actuator.

At the same time that robots like Atlas and Spot are getting more physically robust, they’re getting smarter, thanks to AI. Robotics seems to be reaching an inflection point, where processing power and artificial intelligence are combining to truly ensmarten the machines . And for the machines, just as in humans, the senses and intelligence are inseparable—if you pick up a fake apple and don’t realize it’s plastic before shoving it in your mouth, you’re not very smart.

This is a fascinating frontier in robotics (replicating the sense of touch, not eating fake apples). A company called SynTouch, for instance, has developed robotic fingertips that can detect a range of sensations , from temperature to coarseness. Another robot fingertip from Columbia University replicates touch with light, so in a sense it sees touch : It’s embedded with 32 photodiodes and 30 LEDs, overlaid with a skin of silicone. When that skin is deformed, the photodiodes detect how light from the LEDs changes to pinpoint where exactly you touched the fingertip, and how hard.

Far from the hulking dullards that lift car doors on automotive assembly lines, the robots of tomorrow will be very sensitive indeed.

Increasingly sophisticated machines may populate our world, but for robots to be really useful, they’ll have to become more self-sufficient. After all, it would be impossible to program a home robot with the instructions for gripping each and every object it ever might encounter. You want it to learn on its own, and that is where advances in artificial intelligence come in.

Take Brett. In a UC Berkeley lab, the humanoid robot has taught itself to conquer one of those children’s puzzles where you cram pegs into different shaped holes. It did so by trial and error through a process called reinforcement learning. No one told it how to get a square peg into a square hole, just that it needed to. So by making random movements and getting a digital reward (basically, yes, do that kind of thing again ) each time it got closer to success, Brett learned something new on its own . The process is super slow, sure, but with time roboticists will hone the machines’ ability to teach themselves novel skills in novel environments, which is pivotal if we don’t want to get stuck babysitting them.

Another tack here is to have a digital version of a robot train first in simulation, then port what it has learned to the physical robot in a lab. Over at Google , researchers used motion-capture videos of dogs to program a simulated dog, then used reinforcement learning to get a simulated four-legged robot to teach itself to make the same movements. That is, even though both have four legs, the robot’s body is mechanically distinct from a dog’s, so they move in distinct ways. But after many random movements, the simulated robot got enough rewards to match the simulated dog. Then the researchers transferred that knowledge to the real robot in the lab, and sure enough, the thing could walk—in fact, it walked even faster than the robot manufacturer’s default gait, though in fairness it was less stable.

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They may be getting smarter day by day, but for the near future we are going to have to babysit the robots. As advanced as they’ve become, they still struggle to navigate our world. They plunge into fountains , for instance. So the solution, at least for the short term, is to set up call centers where robots can phone humans to help them out in a pinch . For example, Tug the hospital robot can call for help if it’s roaming the halls at night and there’s no human around to move a cart blocking its path. The operator would them teleoperate the robot around the obstruction.

Speaking of hospital robots. When the coronavirus crisis took hold in early 2020, a group of roboticists saw an opportunity: Robots are the perfect coworkers in a pandemic. Engineers must use the crisis, they argued in an editorial , to supercharge the development of medical robots, which never get sick and can do the dull, dirty, and dangerous work that puts human medical workers in harm’s way. Robot helpers could take patients’ temperatures and deliver drugs, for instance. This would free up human doctors and nurses to do what they do best: problem-solving and being empathetic with patients, skills that robots may never be able to replicate.

The rapidly developing relationship between humans and robots is so complex that it has spawned its own field, known as human-robot interaction . The overarching challenge is this: It’s easy enough to adapt robots to get along with humans—make them soft and give them a sense of touch—but it’s another issue entirely to train humans to get along with the machines. With Tug the hospital robot, for example, doctors and nurses learn to treat it like a grandparent—get the hell out of its way and help it get unstuck if you have to. We also have to manage our expectations: Robots like Atlas may seem advanced, but they’re far from the autonomous wonders you might think.

What humanity has done is essentially invented a new species, and now we’re maybe having a little buyers’ remorse. Namely, what if the robots steal all our jobs? Not even white-collar workers are safe from hyper-intelligent AI, after all.

A lot of smart people are thinking about the singularity, when the machines grow advanced enough to make humanity obsolete. That will result in a massive societal realignment and species-wide existential crisis. What will we do if we no longer have to work? How does income inequality look anything other than exponentially more dire as industries replace people with machines?

These seem like far-out problems, but now is the time to start pondering them. Which you might consider an upside to the killer-robot narrative that Hollywood has fed us all these years: The machines may be limited at the moment, but we as a society need to think seriously about how much power we want to cede. Take San Francisco, for instance, which is exploring the idea of a robot tax, which would force companies to pay up when they displace human workers.

I can’t sit here and promise you that the robots won’t one day turn us all into batteries , but the more realistic scenario is that, unlike in the world of R.U.R. , humans and robots are poised to live in harmony—because it’s already happening. This is the idea of multiplicity , that you’re more likely to work alongside a robot than be replaced by one. If your car has adaptive cruise control, you’re already doing this, letting the robot handle the boring highway work while you take over for the complexity of city driving. The fact that the US economy ground to a standstill during the coronavirus pandemic made it abundantly clear that robots are nowhere near ready to replace humans en masse.

The machines promise to change virtually every aspect of human life, from health care to transportation to work. Should they help us drive? Absolutely. (They will, though, have to make the decision to sometimes kill , but the benefits of precision driving far outweigh the risks.) Should they replace nurses and cops? Maybe not—certain jobs may always require a human touch.

One thing is abundantly clear: The machines have arrived. Now we have to figure out how to handle the responsibility of having invented a whole new species.

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Robots Are Fueling the Quiet Ascendance of the Electric Motor For something born over a century ago, the electric motor really hasn’t fully extended its wings. The problem? Fossil fuels are just too easy, and for the time being, cheap. But now, it’s actually robots, with their actuators, that are fueling the secret ascendence of the electric motor.

This Robot Fish Powers Itself With Fake Blood A robot lionfish uses a rudimentary vasculature and “blood” to both energize itself and hydraulically power its fins.

Inside the Amazon Warehouse Where Humans and Machines Become One In an Amazon sorting center, a swarm of robots works alongside humans. Here’s what that says about Amazon—and the future of work.

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Industries may be ready for humanoid robots, but are the robots ready for them?

Executives from boston dynamics, agility, neura and apptronik discuss the state of the industry.

You could easily walk the entire Automate floor without spotting a single humanoid. There was a grand total of three, by my count — or, rather, three units of the same nonworking prototype. Neura was showing off its long-promised 4NE-1 robot, amid more traditional form factors. There was a little photo setup where you could snap a selfie with the bot, and that was about it.

Notably absent at the annual Association for Advancing Automation (A3) show was an Agility booth. The Oregon company made a big showing at last year’s event, with a small army of Digits moving bins from a tote wall to a conveyer belt a few feet away. It wasn’t a complex demo, but the mere sight of those bipedal robots working in tandem was still a showstopper.

Agility chief product officer Melonee Wise told me that the company had opted to sit this one out, as it currently has all the orders it can manage. And that’s really what these trade shows are about: manufacturers and logistics companies shopping around for the next technological leg up to remain competitive.

How large a role humanoids will play in that ecosystem is, perhaps, the biggest question on everyone’s mind at the moment. Amid the biggest robotics hype cycle I’ve witnessed firsthand, many are left scratching their heads. After all, the notion of a “general purpose” humanoid robot flies in the face of decades’ worth of orthodoxy. The notion of the everything robot has been a fixture of science fiction for the better part of a century, but the reality has been one of single-purpose systems designed to do one job well.

Agility’s Digit at this year’s Modex conference

While there wasn’t much of a physical presence, the subject of humanoids loomed large at the event. As such, A3 asked me to moderate a panel on the subject. I admit I initially balked at the idea of an hourlong panel. After all, the ones we do at Disrupt tend to run 20 to 25 minutes. By the end of the conversation, however, it was clear we easily could have filled another hour.

That was due, in part, to the fact that the panel was — as one LinkedIn commenter put it — “stacked.” Along with Wise, I was joined by Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders, Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas and Neura CEO David Reger. I kicked the panel off by asking the audience how many in attendance would consider themselves skeptical about the humanoid form factor. Roughly three-quarters of the people present raised their hands, which is more or less what I’d anticipate at this stage in the process.

As for A3, I would say it has entered the cautiously optimistic phase. In addition to hosting a panel on the subject at Automate, the organization is holding a Humanoid Robot Forum in Memphis this October. The move echoes the 2019 launch of A3’s Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) Forum, which presaged the explosive growth in warehouse robotics during the pandemic.

Investors are less measured in their optimism.

“A year after we laid our initial expectations for global humanoid robot [total addressable market] of $6bn, we raise our 2035 TAM forecast to $38bn resulting from a 4-fold increase in our shipments estimate to 1.4mn units with a much faster path to profitability on a 40% reduction in bill of materials,” Goldman Sachs researcher Jacqueline Du wrote in a report published in February. “We believe our revised shipment estimate would cover 10%-15% of hazardous, dangerous and auto manufacturing roles.”

There are, however, plenty of reasons to be skeptical. Hype cycles are hard to navigate when you’re in the middle of them. The amount of money currently changing hands (see: Figure’s most recent raise of $675 million) gives one pause in the wake of various startup collapses across other fields. It also comes during a time when robotics investments have slowed after a few white-hot years.

One of the biggest risks at this stage is the overpromise . Every piece of new technology runs this risk, but something like a humanoid robot is a lightning rod for this stuff. Much like how eVTOL proponents see the technology as finally delivering on the promise of flying cars, the concept of personal robot servant looks within reach.

The fact that these robots look like us leads many to believe they can — or soon will be able to — do the same things as us. Elon Musk’s promise of a robot that works in the Tesla factory all day and then comes home to make you dinner added fuel to that fire. Tempering expectations isn’t really Musk’s thing , you know? Others, meanwhile, have tossed around the notion of a general intelligence for humanoid robots — a thing that is a ways off (“five to 10 years” is a time frame I often hear bandied about).

“I think we need to be careful about the hype cycles, because we ultimately need to deliver the promise and potential,” Cardenas said. “We’ve been through this before, with the DARPA Robotics challenge, where there’s a lot of excitement going into it, and we crashed into reality coming out of that.”

One source of disconnect is the question of what these systems can deliver today. The answer is murky, partly because of the nature of partnership announcements. Agility announced it was working with Amazon , Apptronik with Mercedes , Figure with BMW and Sanctuary AI with Magna . But every partnership so far needs to be taken for what it is: a pilot. The precise number of robots deployed in any specific partnership is never disclosed, and the figure is often single digits. It makes perfect sense: These are all operating factories/warehouses. It would be wildly disruptive to just slot in a new technology at scale and hope for the best.

Pilots are important for this reason, but they should not be mistaken for market fit. As of this writing, Agility is the only one of the bunch that has confirmed with TechCrunch that it’s ready for the next step. On the discussion panel, Wise confirmed that Agility will be announcing specifics in June. Cardenas, meanwhile, stated that the company plans to heavily pilot in the “back half” of 2024, with plans to move beyond early next year.

Neura and Boston Dynamics are simply too early stage for the conversation. Neura promised to show off some demos at some point in July, moving 4NE-1 beyond what has up until now been a series of rendered videos, coupled with the nonfunctioning units shown at Automate.

As for when we’ll see more of the electric Atlas beyond a 30-second video, Saunders says, “[the video] is just meant to be an early peek. We’re planning on getting into the pilot and some of the more pragmatic pieces next year. So far, we’re focused mainly on building up the focus and technology. There are a lot of hard problems left to solve in the manipulation and the AI spaces. Our team is working on it right now, and I think as those features get more robust, we’ll have more to show off.”

Boston Dynamics isn’t starting from scratch, of course. After more than a decade of Atlas, the company has as much humanoid expertise as any, while the launches of Spot and Stretch have taught the firm plenty about commercializing products after decades of research.

So, why did it take so long to see the company’s swing at the commercial humanoid category? “We wanted to make sure that we understood where the value is placed,” Saunders said. “It’s really easy to make demo videos and show cool things, but it takes a long time to find ROI [return on investment] cases that justify the human form.”

Neura has easily the most diverse portfolio of the companies present onstage. In fact, one gets the sense that whenever the company is finally ready to launch a humanoid in earnest, it will be just another form factor in the company’s portfolio, rather than the driving force. Meanwhile, when the electric Atlas eventually launches, it will be Boston Dynamics’ third commercially available product.

As Digit is Agility’s only offering at the moment, the company is wholly committed to the bipedal humanoid form factor. For its part, Apptronik splits the difference. The Austin-based firm has been taking a best-tool-for-the-job approach to the form factor. If, for example, legs aren’t needed for a specific environment, the company can mount the upper half of its robot onto a wheeled base.

“I think at the end of the day, it’s about solving problems,” Cardenas said. “There are places where you don’t need a bipedal robot. My view is that bipedal form factors will win the day, but the question is how do you actually get them out there?”

Not every terrain requires legs. Earlier this week, Diligent Robotics co-founder and CEO Andrea Thomaz told me that part of the reason her company targeted healthcare first is the prevalence of ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant structures. Anywhere a wheelchair can go, a wheeled robot should be able to follow. Because of that, the startup didn’t have to commit to the very difficult problem of building legs.

Legs have benefits beyond the ability to handle things like stairs, however. Reach is an important one. Legged robots have an easier time reaching lower shelves, as they can bend at the legs and the waist. You could, theoretically, add a very large arm to the top of an AMR, but doing so introduces all kinds of new problems like balance.

Safety is something that has thus far been under-addressed in conversations around the form factor. One of humanoid robots’ key selling points is their ability to slot into existing workflows alongside other robotic or human co-workers.

But robots like these are big, heavy and made of metal, therefore making them a potential hazard to human workers. The subject has been top of mind for Wise, in particular, who says further standards are needed to ensure that these robots can operate safely alongside people.

For my part, I’ve been advocating for a more standardized approach to robot demos. Videos of humanoids, in particular, have obscured what these robots can and can’t do today. I would love to see disclosures around playback speed, editing, the use of teleop and other tricks of the trade that can be used to deceive (intentionally or not) viewers.

“It’s very hard to distinguish what is and isn’t progress,” Wise said, referring to some recent videos of Tesla’s Optimus robot. “I think one thing that we, as a community, can do better is being more transparent about the methodologies that we’re using. It’s fueling more power for the hype cycle. I think the other problem that we have is, if we look at what’s going on with any humanoid robot in this space, safety is not clear. There isn’t an e-stop on Optimus. There isn’t an e-stop on many of our robots.”

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Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are digital technologies that will have significant impact on the development of humanity in the near future. They have raised fundamental questions about what we should do with these systems, what the systems themselves should do, what risks they involve, and how we can control these.

After the Introduction to the field (§1), the main themes (§2) of this article are: Ethical issues that arise with AI systems as objects , i.e., tools made and used by humans. This includes issues of privacy (§2.1) and manipulation (§2.2), opacity (§2.3) and bias (§2.4), human-robot interaction (§2.5), employment (§2.6), and the effects of autonomy (§2.7). Then AI systems as subjects , i.e., ethics for the AI systems themselves in machine ethics (§2.8) and artificial moral agency (§2.9). Finally, the problem of a possible future AI superintelligence leading to a “singularity” (§2.10). We close with a remark on the vision of AI (§3).

For each section within these themes, we provide a general explanation of the ethical issues , outline existing positions and arguments , then analyse how these play out with current technologies and finally, what policy consequences may be drawn.

1.1 Background of the Field

1.2 ai & robotics, 1.3 a note on policy, 2.1 privacy & surveillance, 2.2 manipulation of behaviour, 2.3 opacity of ai systems, 2.4 bias in decision systems, 2.5 human-robot interaction, 2.6 automation and employment, 2.7 autonomous systems, 2.8 machine ethics, 2.9 artificial moral agents, 2.10 singularity, research organizations, conferences, policy documents, other relevant pages, related entries, 1. introduction.

The ethics of AI and robotics is often focused on “concerns” of various sorts, which is a typical response to new technologies. Many such concerns turn out to be rather quaint (trains are too fast for souls); some are predictably wrong when they suggest that the technology will fundamentally change humans (telephones will destroy personal communication, writing will destroy memory, video cassettes will make going out redundant); some are broadly correct but moderately relevant (digital technology will destroy industries that make photographic film, cassette tapes, or vinyl records); but some are broadly correct and deeply relevant (cars will kill children and fundamentally change the landscape). The task of an article such as this is to analyse the issues and to deflate the non-issues.

Some technologies, like nuclear power, cars, or plastics, have caused ethical and political discussion and significant policy efforts to control the trajectory these technologies, usually only once some damage is done. In addition to such “ethical concerns”, new technologies challenge current norms and conceptual systems, which is of particular interest to philosophy. Finally, once we have understood a technology in its context, we need to shape our societal response, including regulation and law. All these features also exist in the case of new AI and Robotics technologies—plus the more fundamental fear that they may end the era of human control on Earth.

The ethics of AI and robotics has seen significant press coverage in recent years, which supports related research, but also may end up undermining it: the press often talks as if the issues under discussion were just predictions of what future technology will bring, and as though we already know what would be most ethical and how to achieve that. Press coverage thus focuses on risk, security (Brundage et al. 2018, in the Other Internet Resources section below, hereafter [OIR]), and prediction of impact (e.g., on the job market). The result is a discussion of essentially technical problems that focus on how to achieve a desired outcome. Current discussions in policy and industry are also motivated by image and public relations, where the label “ethical” is really not much more than the new “green”, perhaps used for “ethics washing”. For a problem to qualify as a problem for AI ethics would require that we do not readily know what the right thing to do is. In this sense, job loss, theft, or killing with AI is not a problem in ethics, but whether these are permissible under certain circumstances is a problem. This article focuses on the genuine problems of ethics where we do not readily know what the answers are.

A last caveat: The ethics of AI and robotics is a very young field within applied ethics, with significant dynamics, but few well-established issues and no authoritative overviews—though there is a promising outline (European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies 2018) and there are beginnings on societal impact (Floridi et al. 2018; Taddeo and Floridi 2018; S. Taylor et al. 2018; Walsh 2018; Bryson 2019; Gibert 2019; Whittlestone et al. 2019), and policy recommendations (AI HLEG 2019 [OIR]; IEEE 2019). So this article cannot merely reproduce what the community has achieved thus far, but must propose an ordering where little order exists.

The notion of “artificial intelligence” (AI) is understood broadly as any kind of artificial computational system that shows intelligent behaviour, i.e., complex behaviour that is conducive to reaching goals. In particular, we do not wish to restrict “intelligence” to what would require intelligence if done by humans , as Minsky had suggested (1985). This means we incorporate a range of machines, including those in “technical AI”, that show only limited abilities in learning or reasoning but excel at the automation of particular tasks, as well as machines in “general AI” that aim to create a generally intelligent agent.

AI somehow gets closer to our skin than other technologies—thus the field of “philosophy of AI”. Perhaps this is because the project of AI is to create machines that have a feature central to how we humans see ourselves, namely as feeling, thinking, intelligent beings. The main purposes of an artificially intelligent agent probably involve sensing, modelling, planning and action, but current AI applications also include perception, text analysis, natural language processing (NLP), logical reasoning, game-playing, decision support systems, data analytics, predictive analytics, as well as autonomous vehicles and other forms of robotics (P. Stone et al. 2016). AI may involve any number of computational techniques to achieve these aims, be that classical symbol-manipulating AI, inspired by natural cognition, or machine learning via neural networks (Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville 2016; Silver et al. 2018).

Historically, it is worth noting that the term “AI” was used as above ca. 1950–1975, then came into disrepute during the “AI winter”, ca. 1975–1995, and narrowed. As a result, areas such as “machine learning”, “natural language processing” and “data science” were often not labelled as “AI”. Since ca. 2010, the use has broadened again, and at times almost all of computer science and even high-tech is lumped under “AI”. Now it is a name to be proud of, a booming industry with massive capital investment (Shoham et al. 2018), and on the edge of hype again. As Erik Brynjolfsson noted, it may allow us to

virtually eliminate global poverty, massively reduce disease and provide better education to almost everyone on the planet. (quoted in Anderson, Rainie, and Luchsinger 2018)

While AI can be entirely software, robots are physical machines that move. Robots are subject to physical impact, typically through “sensors”, and they exert physical force onto the world, typically through “actuators”, like a gripper or a turning wheel. Accordingly, autonomous cars or planes are robots, and only a minuscule portion of robots is “humanoid” (human-shaped), like in the movies. Some robots use AI, and some do not: Typical industrial robots blindly follow completely defined scripts with minimal sensory input and no learning or reasoning (around 500,000 such new industrial robots are installed each year (IFR 2019 [OIR])). It is probably fair to say that while robotics systems cause more concerns in the general public, AI systems are more likely to have a greater impact on humanity. Also, AI or robotics systems for a narrow set of tasks are less likely to cause new issues than systems that are more flexible and autonomous.

Robotics and AI can thus be seen as covering two overlapping sets of systems: systems that are only AI, systems that are only robotics, and systems that are both. We are interested in all three; the scope of this article is thus not only the intersection, but the union, of both sets.

Policy is only one of the concerns of this article. There is significant public discussion about AI ethics, and there are frequent pronouncements from politicians that the matter requires new policy, which is easier said than done: Actual technology policy is difficult to plan and enforce. It can take many forms, from incentives and funding, infrastructure, taxation, or good-will statements, to regulation by various actors, and the law. Policy for AI will possibly come into conflict with other aims of technology policy or general policy. Governments, parliaments, associations, and industry circles in industrialised countries have produced reports and white papers in recent years, and some have generated good-will slogans (“trusted/responsible/humane/human-centred/good/beneficial AI”), but is that what is needed? For a survey, see Jobin, Ienca, and Vayena (2019) and V. Müller’s list of PT-AI Policy Documents and Institutions .

For people who work in ethics and policy, there might be a tendency to overestimate the impact and threats from a new technology, and to underestimate how far current regulation can reach (e.g., for product liability). On the other hand, there is a tendency for businesses, the military, and some public administrations to “just talk” and do some “ethics washing” in order to preserve a good public image and continue as before. Actually implementing legally binding regulation would challenge existing business models and practices. Actual policy is not just an implementation of ethical theory, but subject to societal power structures—and the agents that do have the power will push against anything that restricts them. There is thus a significant risk that regulation will remain toothless in the face of economical and political power.

Though very little actual policy has been produced, there are some notable beginnings: The latest EU policy document suggests “trustworthy AI” should be lawful, ethical, and technically robust, and then spells this out as seven requirements: human oversight, technical robustness, privacy and data governance, transparency, fairness, well-being, and accountability (AI HLEG 2019 [OIR]). Much European research now runs under the slogan of “responsible research and innovation” (RRI), and “technology assessment” has been a standard field since the advent of nuclear power. Professional ethics is also a standard field in information technology, and this includes issues that are relevant in this article. Perhaps a “code of ethics” for AI engineers, analogous to the codes of ethics for medical doctors, is an option here (Véliz 2019). What data science itself should do is addressed in (L. Taylor and Purtova 2019). We also expect that much policy will eventually cover specific uses or technologies of AI and robotics, rather than the field as a whole. A useful summary of an ethical framework for AI is given in (European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies 2018: 13ff). On general AI policy, see Calo (2018) as well as Crawford and Calo (2016); Stahl, Timmermans, and Mittelstadt (2016); Johnson and Verdicchio (2017); and Giubilini and Savulescu (2018). A more political angle of technology is often discussed in the field of “Science and Technology Studies” (STS). As books like The Ethics of Invention (Jasanoff 2016) show, concerns in STS are often quite similar to those in ethics (Jacobs et al. 2019 [OIR]). In this article, we discuss the policy for each type of issue separately rather than for AI or robotics in general.

2. Main Debates

In this section we outline the ethical issues of human use of AI and robotics systems that can be more or less autonomous—which means we look at issues that arise with certain uses of the technologies which would not arise with others. It must be kept in mind, however, that technologies will always cause some uses to be easier, and thus more frequent, and hinder other uses. The design of technical artefacts thus has ethical relevance for their use (Houkes and Vermaas 2010; Verbeek 2011), so beyond “responsible use”, we also need “responsible design” in this field. The focus on use does not presuppose which ethical approaches are best suited for tackling these issues; they might well be virtue ethics (Vallor 2017) rather than consequentialist or value-based (Floridi et al. 2018). This section is also neutral with respect to the question whether AI systems truly have “intelligence” or other mental properties: It would apply equally well if AI and robotics are merely seen as the current face of automation (cf. Müller forthcoming-b).

There is a general discussion about privacy and surveillance in information technology (e.g., Macnish 2017; Roessler 2017), which mainly concerns the access to private data and data that is personally identifiable. Privacy has several well recognised aspects, e.g., “the right to be let alone”, information privacy, privacy as an aspect of personhood, control over information about oneself, and the right to secrecy (Bennett and Raab 2006). Privacy studies have historically focused on state surveillance by secret services but now include surveillance by other state agents, businesses, and even individuals. The technology has changed significantly in the last decades while regulation has been slow to respond (though there is the Regulation (EU) 2016/679)—the result is a certain anarchy that is exploited by the most powerful players, sometimes in plain sight, sometimes in hiding.

The digital sphere has widened greatly: All data collection and storage is now digital, our lives are increasingly digital, most digital data is connected to a single Internet, and there is more and more sensor technology in use that generates data about non-digital aspects of our lives. AI increases both the possibilities of intelligent data collection and the possibilities for data analysis. This applies to blanket surveillance of whole populations as well as to classic targeted surveillance. In addition, much of the data is traded between agents, usually for a fee.

At the same time, controlling who collects which data, and who has access, is much harder in the digital world than it was in the analogue world of paper and telephone calls. Many new AI technologies amplify the known issues. For example, face recognition in photos and videos allows identification and thus profiling and searching for individuals (Whittaker et al. 2018: 15ff). This continues using other techniques for identification, e.g., “device fingerprinting”, which are commonplace on the Internet (sometimes revealed in the “privacy policy”). The result is that “In this vast ocean of data, there is a frighteningly complete picture of us” (Smolan 2016: 1:01). The result is arguably a scandal that still has not received due public attention.

The data trail we leave behind is how our “free” services are paid for—but we are not told about that data collection and the value of this new raw material, and we are manipulated into leaving ever more such data. For the “big 5” companies (Amazon, Google/Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook), the main data-collection part of their business appears to be based on deception, exploiting human weaknesses, furthering procrastination, generating addiction, and manipulation (Harris 2016 [OIR]). The primary focus of social media, gaming, and most of the Internet in this “surveillance economy” is to gain, maintain, and direct attention—and thus data supply. “Surveillance is the business model of the Internet” (Schneier 2015). This surveillance and attention economy is sometimes called “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019). It has caused many attempts to escape from the grasp of these corporations, e.g., in exercises of “minimalism” (Newport 2019), sometimes through the open source movement, but it appears that present-day citizens have lost the degree of autonomy needed to escape while fully continuing with their life and work. We have lost ownership of our data, if “ownership” is the right relation here. Arguably, we have lost control of our data.

These systems will often reveal facts about us that we ourselves wish to suppress or are not aware of: they know more about us than we know ourselves. Even just observing online behaviour allows insights into our mental states (Burr and Christianini 2019) and manipulation (see below section 2.2 ). This has led to calls for the protection of “derived data” (Wachter and Mittelstadt 2019). With the last sentence of his bestselling book, Homo Deus , Harari asks about the long-term consequences of AI:

What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves? (2016: 462)

Robotic devices have not yet played a major role in this area, except for security patrolling, but this will change once they are more common outside of industry environments. Together with the “Internet of things”, the so-called “smart” systems (phone, TV, oven, lamp, virtual assistant, home,…), “smart city” (Sennett 2018), and “smart governance”, they are set to become part of the data-gathering machinery that offers more detailed data, of different types, in real time, with ever more information.

Privacy-preserving techniques that can largely conceal the identity of persons or groups are now a standard staple in data science; they include (relative) anonymisation , access control (plus encryption), and other models where computation is carried out with fully or partially encrypted input data (Stahl and Wright 2018); in the case of “differential privacy”, this is done by adding calibrated noise to encrypt the output of queries (Dwork et al. 2006; Abowd 2017). While requiring more effort and cost, such techniques can avoid many of the privacy issues. Some companies have also seen better privacy as a competitive advantage that can be leveraged and sold at a price.

One of the major practical difficulties is to actually enforce regulation, both on the level of the state and on the level of the individual who has a claim. They must identify the responsible legal entity, prove the action, perhaps prove intent, find a court that declares itself competent … and eventually get the court to actually enforce its decision. Well-established legal protection of rights such as consumer rights, product liability, and other civil liability or protection of intellectual property rights is often missing in digital products, or hard to enforce. This means that companies with a “digital” background are used to testing their products on the consumers without fear of liability while heavily defending their intellectual property rights. This “Internet Libertarianism” is sometimes taken to assume that technical solutions will take care of societal problems by themselves (Mozorov 2013).

The ethical issues of AI in surveillance go beyond the mere accumulation of data and direction of attention: They include the use of information to manipulate behaviour, online and offline, in a way that undermines autonomous rational choice. Of course, efforts to manipulate behaviour are ancient, but they may gain a new quality when they use AI systems. Given users’ intense interaction with data systems and the deep knowledge about individuals this provides, they are vulnerable to “nudges”, manipulation, and deception. With sufficient prior data, algorithms can be used to target individuals or small groups with just the kind of input that is likely to influence these particular individuals. A ’nudge‘ changes the environment such that it influences behaviour in a predictable way that is positive for the individual, but easy and cheap to avoid (Thaler & Sunstein 2008). There is a slippery slope from here to paternalism and manipulation.

Many advertisers, marketers, and online sellers will use any legal means at their disposal to maximise profit, including exploitation of behavioural biases, deception, and addiction generation (Costa and Halpern 2019 [OIR]). Such manipulation is the business model in much of the gambling and gaming industries, but it is spreading, e.g., to low-cost airlines. In interface design on web pages or in games, this manipulation uses what is called “dark patterns” (Mathur et al. 2019). At this moment, gambling and the sale of addictive substances are highly regulated, but online manipulation and addiction are not—even though manipulation of online behaviour is becoming a core business model of the Internet.

Furthermore, social media is now the prime location for political propaganda. This influence can be used to steer voting behaviour, as in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica “scandal” (Woolley and Howard 2017; Bradshaw, Neudert, and Howard 2019) and—if successful—it may harm the autonomy of individuals (Susser, Roessler, and Nissenbaum 2019).

Improved AI “faking” technologies make what once was reliable evidence into unreliable evidence—this has already happened to digital photos, sound recordings, and video. It will soon be quite easy to create (rather than alter) “deep fake” text, photos, and video material with any desired content. Soon, sophisticated real-time interaction with persons over text, phone, or video will be faked, too. So we cannot trust digital interactions while we are at the same time increasingly dependent on such interactions.

One more specific issue is that machine learning techniques in AI rely on training with vast amounts of data. This means there will often be a trade-off between privacy and rights to data vs. technical quality of the product. This influences the consequentialist evaluation of privacy-violating practices.

The policy in this field has its ups and downs: Civil liberties and the protection of individual rights are under intense pressure from businesses’ lobbying, secret services, and other state agencies that depend on surveillance. Privacy protection has diminished massively compared to the pre-digital age when communication was based on letters, analogue telephone communications, and personal conversation and when surveillance operated under significant legal constraints.

While the EU General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) has strengthened privacy protection, the US and China prefer growth with less regulation (Thompson and Bremmer 2018), likely in the hope that this provides a competitive advantage. It is clear that state and business actors have increased their ability to invade privacy and manipulate people with the help of AI technology and will continue to do so to further their particular interests—unless reined in by policy in the interest of general society.

Opacity and bias are central issues in what is now sometimes called “data ethics” or “big data ethics” (Floridi and Taddeo 2016; Mittelstadt and Floridi 2016). AI systems for automated decision support and “predictive analytics” raise “significant concerns about lack of due process, accountability, community engagement, and auditing” (Whittaker et al. 2018: 18ff). They are part of a power structure in which “we are creating decision-making processes that constrain and limit opportunities for human participation” (Danaher 2016b: 245). At the same time, it will often be impossible for the affected person to know how the system came to this output, i.e., the system is “opaque” to that person. If the system involves machine learning, it will typically be opaque even to the expert, who will not know how a particular pattern was identified, or even what the pattern is. Bias in decision systems and data sets is exacerbated by this opacity. So, at least in cases where there is a desire to remove bias, the analysis of opacity and bias go hand in hand, and political response has to tackle both issues together.

Many AI systems rely on machine learning techniques in (simulated) neural networks that will extract patterns from a given dataset, with or without “correct” solutions provided; i.e., supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. With these techniques, the “learning” captures patterns in the data and these are labelled in a way that appears useful to the decision the system makes, while the programmer does not really know which patterns in the data the system has used. In fact, the programs are evolving, so when new data comes in, or new feedback is given (“this was correct”, “this was incorrect”), the patterns used by the learning system change. What this means is that the outcome is not transparent to the user or programmers: it is opaque. Furthermore, the quality of the program depends heavily on the quality of the data provided, following the old slogan “garbage in, garbage out”. So, if the data already involved a bias (e.g., police data about the skin colour of suspects), then the program will reproduce that bias. There are proposals for a standard description of datasets in a “datasheet” that would make the identification of such bias more feasible (Gebru et al. 2018 [OIR]). There is also significant recent literature about the limitations of machine learning systems that are essentially sophisticated data filters (Marcus 2018 [OIR]). Some have argued that the ethical problems of today are the result of technical “shortcuts” AI has taken (Cristianini forthcoming).

There are several technical activities that aim at “explainable AI”, starting with (Van Lent, Fisher, and Mancuso 1999; Lomas et al. 2012) and, more recently, a DARPA programme (Gunning 2017 [OIR]). More broadly, the demand for

a mechanism for elucidating and articulating the power structures, biases, and influences that computational artefacts exercise in society (Diakopoulos 2015: 398)

is sometimes called “algorithmic accountability reporting”. This does not mean that we expect an AI to “explain its reasoning”—doing so would require far more serious moral autonomy than we currently attribute to AI systems (see below §2.10 ).

The politician Henry Kissinger pointed out that there is a fundamental problem for democratic decision-making if we rely on a system that is supposedly superior to humans, but cannot explain its decisions. He says we may have “generated a potentially dominating technology in search of a guiding philosophy” (Kissinger 2018). Danaher (2016b) calls this problem “the threat of algocracy” (adopting the previous use of ‘algocracy’ from Aneesh 2002 [OIR], 2006). In a similar vein, Cave (2019) stresses that we need a broader societal move towards more “democratic” decision-making to avoid AI being a force that leads to a Kafka-style impenetrable suppression system in public administration and elsewhere. The political angle of this discussion has been stressed by O’Neil in her influential book Weapons of Math Destruction (2016), and by Yeung and Lodge (2019).

In the EU, some of these issues have been taken into account with the (Regulation (EU) 2016/679), which foresees that consumers, when faced with a decision based on data processing, will have a legal “right to explanation”—how far this goes and to what extent it can be enforced is disputed (Goodman and Flaxman 2017; Wachter, Mittelstadt, and Floridi 2016; Wachter, Mittelstadt, and Russell 2017). Zerilli et al. (2019) argue that there may be a double standard here, where we demand a high level of explanation for machine-based decisions despite humans sometimes not reaching that standard themselves.

Automated AI decision support systems and “predictive analytics” operate on data and produce a decision as “output”. This output may range from the relatively trivial to the highly significant: “this restaurant matches your preferences”, “the patient in this X-ray has completed bone growth”, “application to credit card declined”, “donor organ will be given to another patient”, “bail is denied”, or “target identified and engaged”. Data analysis is often used in “predictive analytics” in business, healthcare, and other fields, to foresee future developments—since prediction is easier, it will also become a cheaper commodity. One use of prediction is in “predictive policing” (NIJ 2014 [OIR]), which many fear might lead to an erosion of public liberties (Ferguson 2017) because it can take away power from the people whose behaviour is predicted. It appears, however, that many of the worries about policing depend on futuristic scenarios where law enforcement foresees and punishes planned actions, rather than waiting until a crime has been committed (like in the 2002 film “Minority Report”). One concern is that these systems might perpetuate bias that was already in the data used to set up the system, e.g., by increasing police patrols in an area and discovering more crime in that area. Actual “predictive policing” or “intelligence led policing” techniques mainly concern the question of where and when police forces will be needed most. Also, police officers can be provided with more data, offering them more control and facilitating better decisions, in workflow support software (e.g., “ArcGIS”). Whether this is problematic depends on the appropriate level of trust in the technical quality of these systems, and on the evaluation of aims of the police work itself. Perhaps a recent paper title points in the right direction here: “AI ethics in predictive policing: From models of threat to an ethics of care” (Asaro 2019).

Bias typically surfaces when unfair judgments are made because the individual making the judgment is influenced by a characteristic that is actually irrelevant to the matter at hand, typically a discriminatory preconception about members of a group. So, one form of bias is a learned cognitive feature of a person, often not made explicit. The person concerned may not be aware of having that bias—they may even be honestly and explicitly opposed to a bias they are found to have (e.g., through priming, cf. Graham and Lowery 2004). On fairness vs. bias in machine learning, see Binns (2018).

Apart from the social phenomenon of learned bias, the human cognitive system is generally prone to have various kinds of “cognitive biases”, e.g., the “confirmation bias”: humans tend to interpret information as confirming what they already believe. This second form of bias is often said to impede performance in rational judgment (Kahnemann 2011)—though at least some cognitive biases generate an evolutionary advantage, e.g., economical use of resources for intuitive judgment. There is a question whether AI systems could or should have such cognitive bias.

A third form of bias is present in data when it exhibits systematic error, e.g., “statistical bias”. Strictly, any given dataset will only be unbiased for a single kind of issue, so the mere creation of a dataset involves the danger that it may be used for a different kind of issue, and then turn out to be biased for that kind. Machine learning on the basis of such data would then not only fail to recognise the bias, but codify and automate the “historical bias”. Such historical bias was discovered in an automated recruitment screening system at Amazon (discontinued early 2017) that discriminated against women—presumably because the company had a history of discriminating against women in the hiring process. The “Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions” (COMPAS), a system to predict whether a defendant would re-offend, was found to be as successful (65.2% accuracy) as a group of random humans (Dressel and Farid 2018) and to produce more false positives and less false negatives for black defendants. The problem with such systems is thus bias plus humans placing excessive trust in the systems. The political dimensions of such automated systems in the USA are investigated in Eubanks (2018).

There are significant technical efforts to detect and remove bias from AI systems, but it is fair to say that these are in early stages: see UK Institute for Ethical AI & Machine Learning (Brownsword, Scotford, and Yeung 2017; Yeung and Lodge 2019). It appears that technological fixes have their limits in that they need a mathematical notion of fairness, which is hard to come by (Whittaker et al. 2018: 24ff; Selbst et al. 2019), as is a formal notion of “race” (see Benthall and Haynes 2019). An institutional proposal is in (Veale and Binns 2017).

Human-robot interaction (HRI) is an academic fields in its own right, which now pays significant attention to ethical matters, the dynamics of perception from both sides, and both the different interests present in and the intricacy of the social context, including co-working (e.g., Arnold and Scheutz 2017). Useful surveys for the ethics of robotics include Calo, Froomkin, and Kerr (2016); Royakkers and van Est (2016); Tzafestas (2016); a standard collection of papers is Lin, Abney, and Jenkins (2017).

While AI can be used to manipulate humans into believing and doing things (see section 2.2 ), it can also be used to drive robots that are problematic if their processes or appearance involve deception, threaten human dignity, or violate the Kantian requirement of “respect for humanity”. Humans very easily attribute mental properties to objects, and empathise with them, especially when the outer appearance of these objects is similar to that of living beings. This can be used to deceive humans (or animals) into attributing more intellectual or even emotional significance to robots or AI systems than they deserve. Some parts of humanoid robotics are problematic in this regard (e.g., Hiroshi Ishiguro’s remote-controlled Geminoids), and there are cases that have been clearly deceptive for public-relations purposes (e.g. on the abilities of Hanson Robotics’ “Sophia”). Of course, some fairly basic constraints of business ethics and law apply to robots, too: product safety and liability, or non-deception in advertisement. It appears that these existing constraints take care of many concerns that are raised. There are cases, however, where human-human interaction has aspects that appear specifically human in ways that can perhaps not be replaced by robots: care, love, and sex.

2.5.1 Example (a) Care Robots

The use of robots in health care for humans is currently at the level of concept studies in real environments, but it may become a usable technology in a few years, and has raised a number of concerns for a dystopian future of de-humanised care (A. Sharkey and N. Sharkey 2011; Robert Sparrow 2016). Current systems include robots that support human carers/caregivers (e.g., in lifting patients, or transporting material), robots that enable patients to do certain things by themselves (e.g., eat with a robotic arm), but also robots that are given to patients as company and comfort (e.g., the “Paro” robot seal). For an overview, see van Wynsberghe (2016); Nørskov (2017); Fosch-Villaronga and Albo-Canals (2019), for a survey of users Draper et al. (2014).

One reason why the issue of care has come to the fore is that people have argued that we will need robots in ageing societies. This argument makes problematic assumptions, namely that with longer lifespan people will need more care, and that it will not be possible to attract more humans to caring professions. It may also show a bias about age (Jecker forthcoming). Most importantly, it ignores the nature of automation, which is not simply about replacing humans, but about allowing humans to work more efficiently. It is not very clear that there really is an issue here since the discussion mostly focuses on the fear of robots de-humanising care, but the actual and foreseeable robots in care are assistive robots for classic automation of technical tasks. They are thus “care robots” only in a behavioural sense of performing tasks in care environments, not in the sense that a human “cares” for the patients. It appears that the success of “being cared for” relies on this intentional sense of “care”, which foreseeable robots cannot provide. If anything, the risk of robots in care is the absence of such intentional care—because less human carers may be needed. Interestingly, caring for something, even a virtual agent, can be good for the carer themselves (Lee et al. 2019). A system that pretends to care would be deceptive and thus problematic—unless the deception is countered by sufficiently large utility gain (Coeckelbergh 2016). Some robots that pretend to “care” on a basic level are available (Paro seal) and others are in the making. Perhaps feeling cared for by a machine, to some extent, is progress for come patients.

2.5.2 Example (b) Sex Robots

It has been argued by several tech optimists that humans will likely be interested in sex and companionship with robots and be comfortable with the idea (Levy 2007). Given the variation of human sexual preferences, including sex toys and sex dolls, this seems very likely: The question is whether such devices should be manufactured and promoted, and whether there should be limits in this touchy area. It seems to have moved into the mainstream of “robot philosophy” in recent times (Sullins 2012; Danaher and McArthur 2017; N. Sharkey et al. 2017 [OIR]; Bendel 2018; Devlin 2018).

Humans have long had deep emotional attachments to objects, so perhaps companionship or even love with a predictable android is attractive, especially to people who struggle with actual humans, and already prefer dogs, cats, birds, a computer or a tamagotchi . Danaher (2019b) argues against (Nyholm and Frank 2017) that these can be true friendships, and is thus a valuable goal. It certainly looks like such friendship might increase overall utility, even if lacking in depth. In these discussions there is an issue of deception, since a robot cannot (at present) mean what it says, or have feelings for a human. It is well known that humans are prone to attribute feelings and thoughts to entities that behave as if they had sentience,even to clearly inanimate objects that show no behaviour at all. Also, paying for deception seems to be an elementary part of the traditional sex industry.

Finally, there are concerns that have often accompanied matters of sex, namely consent (Frank and Nyholm 2017), aesthetic concerns, and the worry that humans may be “corrupted” by certain experiences. Old fashioned though this may seem, human behaviour is influenced by experience, and it is likely that pornography or sex robots support the perception of other humans as mere objects of desire, or even recipients of abuse, and thus ruin a deeper sexual and erotic experience. In this vein, the “Campaign Against Sex Robots” argues that these devices are a continuation of slavery and prostitution (Richardson 2016).

It seems clear that AI and robotics will lead to significant gains in productivity and thus overall wealth. The attempt to increase productivity has often been a feature of the economy, though the emphasis on “growth” is a modern phenomenon (Harari 2016: 240). However, productivity gains through automation typically mean that fewer humans are required for the same output. This does not necessarily imply a loss of overall employment, however, because available wealth increases and that can increase demand sufficiently to counteract the productivity gain. In the long run, higher productivity in industrial societies has led to more wealth overall. Major labour market disruptions have occurred in the past, e.g., farming employed over 60% of the workforce in Europe and North-America in 1800, while by 2010 it employed ca. 5% in the EU, and even less in the wealthiest countries (European Commission 2013). In the 20 years between 1950 and 1970 the number of hired agricultural workers in the UK was reduced by 50% (Zayed and Loft 2019). Some of these disruptions lead to more labour-intensive industries moving to places with lower labour cost. This is an ongoing process.

Classic automation replaced human muscle, whereas digital automation replaces human thought or information-processing—and unlike physical machines, digital automation is very cheap to duplicate (Bostrom and Yudkowsky 2014). It may thus mean a more radical change on the labour market. So, the main question is: will the effects be different this time? Will the creation of new jobs and wealth keep up with the destruction of jobs? And even if it is not different, what are the transition costs, and who bears them? Do we need to make societal adjustments for a fair distribution of costs and benefits of digital automation?

Responses to the issue of unemployment from AI have ranged from the alarmed (Frey and Osborne 2013; Westlake 2014) to the neutral (Metcalf, Keller, and Boyd 2016 [OIR]; Calo 2018; Frey 2019) to the optimistic (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2016; Harari 2016; Danaher 2019a). In principle, the labour market effect of automation seems to be fairly well understood as involving two channels:

(i) the nature of interactions between differently skilled workers and new technologies affecting labour demand and (ii) the equilibrium effects of technological progress through consequent changes in labour supply and product markets. (Goos 2018: 362)

What currently seems to happen in the labour market as a result of AI and robotics automation is “job polarisation” or the “dumbbell” shape (Goos, Manning, and Salomons 2009): The highly skilled technical jobs are in demand and highly paid, the low skilled service jobs are in demand and badly paid, but the mid-qualification jobs in factories and offices, i.e., the majority of jobs, are under pressure and reduced because they are relatively predictable, and most likely to be automated (Baldwin 2019).

Perhaps enormous productivity gains will allow the “age of leisure” to be realised, something (Keynes 1930) had predicted to occur around 2030, assuming a growth rate of 1% per annum. Actually, we have already reached the level he anticipated for 2030, but we are still working—consuming more and inventing ever more levels of organisation. Harari explains how this economic development allowed humanity to overcome hunger, disease, and war—and now we aim for immortality and eternal bliss through AI, thus his title Homo Deus (Harari 2016: 75).

In general terms, the issue of unemployment is an issue of how goods in a society should be justly distributed. A standard view is that distributive justice should be rationally decided from behind a “veil of ignorance” (Rawls 1971), i.e., as if one does not know what position in a society one would actually be taking (labourer or industrialist, etc.). Rawls thought the chosen principles would then support basic liberties and a distribution that is of greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society. It would appear that the AI economy has three features that make such justice unlikely: First, it operates in a largely unregulated environment where responsibility is often hard to allocate. Second, it operates in markets that have a “winner takes all” feature where monopolies develop quickly. Third, the “new economy” of the digital service industries is based on intangible assets, also called “capitalism without capital” (Haskel and Westlake 2017). This means that it is difficult to control multinational digital corporations that do not rely on a physical plant in a particular location. These three features seem to suggest that if we leave the distribution of wealth to free market forces, the result would be a heavily unjust distribution: And this is indeed a development that we can already see.

One interesting question that has not received too much attention is whether the development of AI is environmentally sustainable: Like all computing systems, AI systems produce waste that is very hard to recycle and they consume vast amounts of energy, especially for the training of machine learning systems (and even for the “mining” of cryptocurrency). Again, it appears that some actors in this space offload such costs to the general society.

There are several notions of autonomy in the discussion of autonomous systems. A stronger notion is involved in philosophical debates where autonomy is the basis for responsibility and personhood (Christman 2003 [2018]). In this context, responsibility implies autonomy, but not inversely, so there can be systems that have degrees of technical autonomy without raising issues of responsibility. The weaker, more technical, notion of autonomy in robotics is relative and gradual: A system is said to be autonomous with respect to human control to a certain degree (Müller 2012). There is a parallel here to the issues of bias and opacity in AI since autonomy also concerns a power-relation: who is in control, and who is responsible?

Generally speaking, one question is the degree to which autonomous robots raise issues our present conceptual schemes must adapt to, or whether they just require technical adjustments. In most jurisdictions, there is a sophisticated system of civil and criminal liability to resolve such issues. Technical standards, e.g., for the safe use of machinery in medical environments, will likely need to be adjusted. There is already a field of “verifiable AI” for such safety-critical systems and for “security applications”. Bodies like the IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and the BSI (British Standards Institution) have produced “standards”, particularly on more technical sub-problems, such as data security and transparency. Among the many autonomous systems on land, on water, under water, in air or space, we discuss two samples: autonomous vehicles and autonomous weapons.

2.7.1 Example (a) Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles hold the promise to reduce the very significant damage that human driving currently causes—approximately 1 million humans being killed per year, many more injured, the environment polluted, earth sealed with concrete and tarmac, cities full of parked cars, etc. However, there seem to be questions on how autonomous vehicles should behave, and how responsibility and risk should be distributed in the complicated system the vehicles operates in. (There is also significant disagreement over how long the development of fully autonomous, or “level 5” cars (SAE International 2018) will actually take.)

There is some discussion of “trolley problems” in this context. In the classic “trolley problems” (Thomson 1976; Woollard and Howard-Snyder 2016: section 2) various dilemmas are presented. The simplest version is that of a trolley train on a track that is heading towards five people and will kill them, unless the train is diverted onto a side track, but on that track there is one person, who will be killed if the train takes that side track. The example goes back to a remark in (Foot 1967: 6), who discusses a number of dilemma cases where tolerated and intended consequences of an action differ. “Trolley problems” are not supposed to describe actual ethical problems or to be solved with a “right” choice. Rather, they are thought-experiments where choice is artificially constrained to a small finite number of distinct one-off options and where the agent has perfect knowledge. These problems are used as a theoretical tool to investigate ethical intuitions and theories—especially the difference between actively doing vs. allowing something to happen, intended vs. tolerated consequences, and consequentialist vs. other normative approaches (Kamm 2016). This type of problem has reminded many of the problems encountered in actual driving and in autonomous driving (Lin 2016). It is doubtful, however, that an actual driver or autonomous car will ever have to solve trolley problems (but see Keeling 2020). While autonomous car trolley problems have received a lot of media attention (Awad et al. 2018), they do not seem to offer anything new to either ethical theory or to the programming of autonomous vehicles.

The more common ethical problems in driving, such as speeding, risky overtaking, not keeping a safe distance, etc. are classic problems of pursuing personal interest vs. the common good. The vast majority of these are covered by legal regulations on driving. Programming the car to drive “by the rules” rather than “by the interest of the passengers” or “to achieve maximum utility” is thus deflated to a standard problem of programming ethical machines (see section 2.9 ). There are probably additional discretionary rules of politeness and interesting questions on when to break the rules (Lin 2016), but again this seems to be more a case of applying standard considerations (rules vs. utility) to the case of autonomous vehicles.

Notable policy efforts in this field include the report (German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure 2017), which stresses that safety is the primary objective. Rule 10 states

In the case of automated and connected driving systems, the accountability that was previously the sole preserve of the individual shifts from the motorist to the manufacturers and operators of the technological systems and to the bodies responsible for taking infrastructure, policy and legal decisions.

(See section 2.10.1 below). The resulting German and EU laws on licensing automated driving are much more restrictive than their US counterparts where “testing on consumers” is a strategy used by some companies—without informed consent of the consumers or their possible victims.

2.7.2 Example (b) Autonomous Weapons

The notion of automated weapons is fairly old:

For example, instead of fielding simple guided missiles or remotely piloted vehicles, we might launch completely autonomous land, sea, and air vehicles capable of complex, far-ranging reconnaissance and attack missions. (DARPA 1983: 1)

This proposal was ridiculed as “fantasy” at the time (Dreyfus, Dreyfus, and Athanasiou 1986: ix), but it is now a reality, at least for more easily identifiable targets (missiles, planes, ships, tanks, etc.), but not for human combatants. The main arguments against (lethal) autonomous weapon systems (AWS or LAWS), are that they support extrajudicial killings, take responsibility away from humans, and make wars or killings more likely—for a detailed list of issues see Lin, Bekey, and Abney (2008: 73–86).

It appears that lowering the hurdle to use such systems (autonomous vehicles, “fire-and-forget” missiles, or drones loaded with explosives) and reducing the probability of being held accountable would increase the probability of their use. The crucial asymmetry where one side can kill with impunity, and thus has few reasons not to do so, already exists in conventional drone wars with remote controlled weapons (e.g., US in Pakistan). It is easy to imagine a small drone that searches, identifies, and kills an individual human—or perhaps a type of human. These are the kinds of cases brought forward by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and other activist groups. Some seem to be equivalent to saying that autonomous weapons are indeed weapons …, and weapons kill, but we still make them in gigantic numbers. On the matter of accountability, autonomous weapons might make identification and prosecution of the responsible agents more difficult—but this is not clear, given the digital records that one can keep, at least in a conventional war. The difficulty of allocating punishment is sometimes called the “retribution gap” (Danaher 2016a).

Another question is whether using autonomous weapons in war would make wars worse, or make wars less bad. If robots reduce war crimes and crimes in war, the answer may well be positive and has been used as an argument in favour of these weapons (Arkin 2009; Müller 2016a) but also as an argument against them (Amoroso and Tamburrini 2018). Arguably the main threat is not the use of such weapons in conventional warfare, but in asymmetric conflicts or by non-state agents, including criminals.

It has also been said that autonomous weapons cannot conform to International Humanitarian Law, which requires observance of the principles of distinction (between combatants and civilians), proportionality (of force), and military necessity (of force) in military conflict (A. Sharkey 2019). It is true that the distinction between combatants and non-combatants is hard, but the distinction between civilian and military ships is easy—so all this says is that we should not construct and use such weapons if they do violate Humanitarian Law. Additional concerns have been raised that being killed by an autonomous weapon threatens human dignity, but even the defenders of a ban on these weapons seem to say that these are not good arguments:

There are other weapons, and other technologies, that also compromise human dignity. Given this, and the ambiguities inherent in the concept, it is wiser to draw on several types of objections in arguments against AWS, and not to rely exclusively on human dignity. (A. Sharkey 2019)

A lot has been made of keeping humans “in the loop” or “on the loop” in the military guidance on weapons—these ways of spelling out “meaningful control” are discussed in (Santoni de Sio and van den Hoven 2018). There have been discussions about the difficulties of allocating responsibility for the killings of an autonomous weapon, and a “responsibility gap” has been suggested (esp. Rob Sparrow 2007), meaning that neither the human nor the machine may be responsible. On the other hand, we do not assume that for every event there is someone responsible for that event, and the real issue may well be the distribution of risk (Simpson and Müller 2016). Risk analysis (Hansson 2013) indicates it is crucial to identify who is exposed to risk, who is a potential beneficiary , and who makes the decisions (Hansson 2018: 1822–1824).

Machine ethics is ethics for machines, for “ethical machines”, for machines as subjects , rather than for the human use of machines as objects. It is often not very clear whether this is supposed to cover all of AI ethics or to be a part of it (Floridi and Saunders 2004; Moor 2006; Anderson and Anderson 2011; Wallach and Asaro 2017). Sometimes it looks as though there is the (dubious) inference at play here that if machines act in ethically relevant ways, then we need a machine ethics. Accordingly, some use a broader notion:

machine ethics is concerned with ensuring that the behavior of machines toward human users, and perhaps other machines as well, is ethically acceptable. (Anderson and Anderson 2007: 15)

This might include mere matters of product safety, for example. Other authors sound rather ambitious but use a narrower notion:

AI reasoning should be able to take into account societal values, moral and ethical considerations; weigh the respective priorities of values held by different stakeholders in various multicultural contexts; explain its reasoning; and guarantee transparency. (Dignum 2018: 1, 2)

Some of the discussion in machine ethics makes the very substantial assumption that machines can, in some sense, be ethical agents responsible for their actions, or “autonomous moral agents” (see van Wynsberghe and Robbins 2019). The basic idea of machine ethics is now finding its way into actual robotics where the assumption that these machines are artificial moral agents in any substantial sense is usually not made (Winfield et al. 2019). It is sometimes observed that a robot that is programmed to follow ethical rules can very easily be modified to follow unethical rules (Vanderelst and Winfield 2018).

The idea that machine ethics might take the form of “laws” has famously been investigated by Isaac Asimov, who proposed “three laws of robotics” (Asimov 1942):

First Law—A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second Law—A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Third Law—A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Asimov then showed in a number of stories how conflicts between these three laws will make it problematic to use them despite their hierarchical organisation.

It is not clear that there is a consistent notion of “machine ethics” since weaker versions are in danger of reducing “having an ethics” to notions that would not normally be considered sufficient (e.g., without “reflection” or even without “action”); stronger notions that move towards artificial moral agents may describe a—currently—empty set.

If one takes machine ethics to concern moral agents, in some substantial sense, then these agents can be called “artificial moral agents”, having rights and responsibilities. However, the discussion about artificial entities challenges a number of common notions in ethics and it can be very useful to understand these in abstraction from the human case (cf. Misselhorn 2020; Powers and Ganascia forthcoming).

Several authors use “artificial moral agent” in a less demanding sense, borrowing from the use of “agent” in software engineering in which case matters of responsibility and rights will not arise (Allen, Varner, and Zinser 2000). James Moor (2006) distinguishes four types of machine agents: ethical impact agents (e.g., robot jockeys), implicit ethical agents (e.g., safe autopilot), explicit ethical agents (e.g., using formal methods to estimate utility), and full ethical agents (who “can make explicit ethical judgments and generally is competent to reasonably justify them. An average adult human is a full ethical agent”.) Several ways to achieve “explicit” or “full” ethical agents have been proposed, via programming it in (operational morality), via “developing” the ethics itself (functional morality), and finally full-blown morality with full intelligence and sentience (Allen, Smit, and Wallach 2005; Moor 2006). Programmed agents are sometimes not considered “full” agents because they are “competent without comprehension”, just like the neurons in a brain (Dennett 2017; Hakli and Mäkelä 2019).

In some discussions, the notion of “moral patient” plays a role: Ethical agents have responsibilities while ethical patients have rights because harm to them matters. It seems clear that some entities are patients without being agents, e.g., simple animals that can feel pain but cannot make justified choices. On the other hand, it is normally understood that all agents will also be patients (e.g., in a Kantian framework). Usually, being a person is supposed to be what makes an entity a responsible agent, someone who can have duties and be the object of ethical concerns. Such personhood is typically a deep notion associated with phenomenal consciousness, intention and free will (Frankfurt 1971; Strawson 1998). Torrance (2011) suggests “artificial (or machine) ethics could be defined as designing machines that do things that, when done by humans, are indicative of the possession of ‘ethical status’ in those humans” (2011: 116)—which he takes to be “ethical productivity and ethical receptivity ” (2011: 117)—his expressions for moral agents and patients.

2.9.1 Responsibility for Robots

There is broad consensus that accountability, liability, and the rule of law are basic requirements that must be upheld in the face of new technologies (European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies 2018, 18), but the issue in the case of robots is how this can be done and how responsibility can be allocated. If the robots act, will they themselves be responsible, liable, or accountable for their actions? Or should the distribution of risk perhaps take precedence over discussions of responsibility?

Traditional distribution of responsibility already occurs: A car maker is responsible for the technical safety of the car, a driver is responsible for driving, a mechanic is responsible for proper maintenance, the public authorities are responsible for the technical conditions of the roads, etc. In general

The effects of decisions or actions based on AI are often the result of countless interactions among many actors, including designers, developers, users, software, and hardware.… With distributed agency comes distributed responsibility. (Taddeo and Floridi 2018: 751).

How this distribution might occur is not a problem that is specific to AI, but it gains particular urgency in this context (Nyholm 2018a, 2018b). In classical control engineering, distributed control is often achieved through a control hierarchy plus control loops across these hierarchies.

2.9.2 Rights for Robots

Some authors have indicated that it should be seriously considered whether current robots must be allocated rights (Gunkel 2018a, 2018b; Danaher forthcoming; Turner 2019). This position seems to rely largely on criticism of the opponents and on the empirical observation that robots and other non-persons are sometimes treated as having rights. In this vein, a “relational turn” has been proposed: If we relate to robots as though they had rights, then we might be well-advised not to search whether they “really” do have such rights (Coeckelbergh 2010, 2012, 2018). This raises the question how far such anti-realism or quasi-realism can go, and what it means then to say that “robots have rights” in a human-centred approach (Gerdes 2016). On the other side of the debate, Bryson has insisted that robots should not enjoy rights (Bryson 2010), though she considers it a possibility (Gunkel and Bryson 2014).

There is a wholly separate issue whether robots (or other AI systems) should be given the status of “legal entities” or “legal persons” in a sense natural persons, but also states, businesses, or organisations are “entities”, namely they can have legal rights and duties. The European Parliament has considered allocating such status to robots in order to deal with civil liability (EU Parliament 2016; Bertolini and Aiello 2018), but not criminal liability—which is reserved for natural persons. It would also be possible to assign only a certain subset of rights and duties to robots. It has been said that “such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally troublesome” because it would not serve the interest of humans (Bryson, Diamantis, and Grant 2017: 273). In environmental ethics there is a long-standing discussion about the legal rights for natural objects like trees (C. D. Stone 1972).

It has also been said that the reasons for developing robots with rights, or artificial moral patients, in the future are ethically doubtful (van Wynsberghe and Robbins 2019). In the community of “artificial consciousness” researchers there is a significant concern whether it would be ethical to create such consciousness since creating it would presumably imply ethical obligations to a sentient being, e.g., not to harm it and not to end its existence by switching it off—some authors have called for a “moratorium on synthetic phenomenology” (Bentley et al. 2018: 28f).

2.10.1 Singularity and Superintelligence

In some quarters, the aim of current AI is thought to be an “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), contrasted to a technical or “narrow” AI. AGI is usually distinguished from traditional notions of AI as a general purpose system, and from Searle’s notion of “strong AI”:

computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states. (Searle 1980: 417)

The idea of singularity is that if the trajectory of artificial intelligence reaches up to systems that have a human level of intelligence, then these systems would themselves have the ability to develop AI systems that surpass the human level of intelligence, i.e., they are “superintelligent” (see below). Such superintelligent AI systems would quickly self-improve or develop even more intelligent systems. This sharp turn of events after reaching superintelligent AI is the “singularity” from which the development of AI is out of human control and hard to predict (Kurzweil 2005: 487).

The fear that “the robots we created will take over the world” had captured human imagination even before there were computers (e.g., Butler 1863) and is the central theme in Čapek’s famous play that introduced the word “robot” (Čapek 1920). This fear was first formulated as a possible trajectory of existing AI into an “intelligence explosion” by Irvin Good:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. (Good 1965: 33)

The optimistic argument from acceleration to singularity is spelled out by Kurzweil (1999, 2005, 2012) who essentially points out that computing power has been increasing exponentially, i.e., doubling ca. every 2 years since 1970 in accordance with “Moore’s Law” on the number of transistors, and will continue to do so for some time in the future. He predicted in (Kurzweil 1999) that by 2010 supercomputers will reach human computation capacity, by 2030 “mind uploading” will be possible, and by 2045 the “singularity” will occur. Kurzweil talks about an increase in computing power that can be purchased at a given cost—but of course in recent years the funds available to AI companies have also increased enormously: Amodei and Hernandez (2018 [OIR]) thus estimate that in the years 2012–2018 the actual computing power available to train a particular AI system doubled every 3.4 months, resulting in an 300,000x increase—not the 7x increase that doubling every two years would have created.

A common version of this argument (Chalmers 2010) talks about an increase in “intelligence” of the AI system (rather than raw computing power), but the crucial point of “singularity” remains the one where further development of AI is taken over by AI systems and accelerates beyond human level. Bostrom (2014) explains in some detail what would happen at that point and what the risks for humanity are. The discussion is summarised in Eden et al. (2012); Armstrong (2014); Shanahan (2015). There are possible paths to superintelligence other than computing power increase, e.g., the complete emulation of the human brain on a computer (Kurzweil 2012; Sandberg 2013), biological paths, or networks and organisations (Bostrom 2014: 22–51).

Despite obvious weaknesses in the identification of “intelligence” with processing power, Kurzweil seems right that humans tend to underestimate the power of exponential growth. Mini-test: If you walked in steps in such a way that each step is double the previous, starting with a step of one metre, how far would you get with 30 steps? (answer: almost 3 times further than the Earth’s only permanent natural satellite.) Indeed, most progress in AI is readily attributable to the availability of processors that are faster by degrees of magnitude, larger storage, and higher investment (Müller 2018). The actual acceleration and its speeds are discussed in (Müller and Bostrom 2016; Bostrom, Dafoe, and Flynn forthcoming); Sandberg (2019) argues that progress will continue for some time.

The participants in this debate are united by being technophiles in the sense that they expect technology to develop rapidly and bring broadly welcome changes—but beyond that, they divide into those who focus on benefits (e.g., Kurzweil) and those who focus on risks (e.g., Bostrom). Both camps sympathise with “transhuman” views of survival for humankind in a different physical form, e.g., uploaded on a computer (Moravec 1990, 1998; Bostrom 2003a, 2003c). They also consider the prospects of “human enhancement” in various respects, including intelligence—often called “IA” (intelligence augmentation). It may be that future AI will be used for human enhancement, or will contribute further to the dissolution of the neatly defined human single person. Robin Hanson provides detailed speculation about what will happen economically in case human “brain emulation” enables truly intelligent robots or “ems” (Hanson 2016).

The argument from superintelligence to risk requires the assumption that superintelligence does not imply benevolence—contrary to Kantian traditions in ethics that have argued higher levels of rationality or intelligence would go along with a better understanding of what is moral and better ability to act morally (Gewirth 1978; Chalmers 2010: 36f). Arguments for risk from superintelligence say that rationality and morality are entirely independent dimensions—this is sometimes explicitly argued for as an “orthogonality thesis” (Bostrom 2012; Armstrong 2013; Bostrom 2014: 105–109).

Criticism of the singularity narrative has been raised from various angles. Kurzweil and Bostrom seem to assume that intelligence is a one-dimensional property and that the set of intelligent agents is totally-ordered in the mathematical sense—but neither discusses intelligence at any length in their books. Generally, it is fair to say that despite some efforts, the assumptions made in the powerful narrative of superintelligence and singularity have not been investigated in detail. One question is whether such a singularity will ever occur—it may be conceptually impossible, practically impossible or may just not happen because of contingent events, including people actively preventing it. Philosophically, the interesting question is whether singularity is just a “myth” (Floridi 2016; Ganascia 2017), and not on the trajectory of actual AI research. This is something that practitioners often assume (e.g., Brooks 2017 [OIR]). They may do so because they fear the public relations backlash, because they overestimate the practical problems, or because they have good reasons to think that superintelligence is an unlikely outcome of current AI research (Müller forthcoming-a). This discussion raises the question whether the concern about “singularity” is just a narrative about fictional AI based on human fears. But even if one does find negative reasons compelling and the singularity not likely to occur, there is still a significant possibility that one may turn out to be wrong. Philosophy is not on the “secure path of a science” (Kant 1791: B15), and maybe AI and robotics aren’t either (Müller 2020). So, it appears that discussing the very high-impact risk of singularity has justification even if one thinks the probability of such singularity ever occurring is very low.

2.10.2 Existential Risk from Superintelligence

Thinking about superintelligence in the long term raises the question whether superintelligence may lead to the extinction of the human species, which is called an “existential risk” (or XRisk): The superintelligent systems may well have preferences that conflict with the existence of humans on Earth, and may thus decide to end that existence—and given their superior intelligence, they will have the power to do so (or they may happen to end it because they do not really care).

Thinking in the long term is the crucial feature of this literature. Whether the singularity (or another catastrophic event) occurs in 30 or 300 or 3000 years does not really matter (Baum et al. 2019). Perhaps there is even an astronomical pattern such that an intelligent species is bound to discover AI at some point, and thus bring about its own demise. Such a “great filter” would contribute to the explanation of the “Fermi paradox” why there is no sign of life in the known universe despite the high probability of it emerging. It would be bad news if we found out that the “great filter” is ahead of us, rather than an obstacle that Earth has already passed. These issues are sometimes taken more narrowly to be about human extinction (Bostrom 2013), or more broadly as concerning any large risk for the species (Rees 2018)—of which AI is only one (Häggström 2016; Ord 2020). Bostrom also uses the category of “global catastrophic risk” for risks that are sufficiently high up the two dimensions of “scope” and “severity” (Bostrom and Ćirković 2011; Bostrom 2013).

These discussions of risk are usually not connected to the general problem of ethics under risk (e.g., Hansson 2013, 2018). The long-term view has its own methodological challenges but has produced a wide discussion: (Tegmark 2017) focuses on AI and human life “3.0” after singularity while Russell, Dewey, and Tegmark (2015) and Bostrom, Dafoe, and Flynn (forthcoming) survey longer-term policy issues in ethical AI. Several collections of papers have investigated the risks of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the factors that might make this development more or less risk-laden (Müller 2016b; Callaghan et al. 2017; Yampolskiy 2018), including the development of non-agent AI (Drexler 2019).

2.10.3 Controlling Superintelligence?

In a narrow sense, the “control problem” is how we humans can remain in control of an AI system once it is superintelligent (Bostrom 2014: 127ff). In a wider sense, it is the problem of how we can make sure an AI system will turn out to be positive according to human perception (Russell 2019); this is sometimes called “value alignment”. How easy or hard it is to control a superintelligence depends significantly on the speed of “take-off” to a superintelligent system. This has led to particular attention to systems with self-improvement, such as AlphaZero (Silver et al. 2018).

One aspect of this problem is that we might decide a certain feature is desirable, but then find out that it has unforeseen consequences that are so negative that we would not desire that feature after all. This is the ancient problem of King Midas who wished that all he touched would turn into gold. This problem has been discussed on the occasion of various examples, such as the “paperclip maximiser” (Bostrom 2003b), or the program to optimise chess performance (Omohundro 2014).

Discussions about superintelligence include speculation about omniscient beings, the radical changes on a “latter day”, and the promise of immortality through transcendence of our current bodily form—so sometimes they have clear religious undertones (Capurro 1993; Geraci 2008, 2010; O’Connell 2017: 160ff). These issues also pose a well-known problem of epistemology: Can we know the ways of the omniscient (Danaher 2015)? The usual opponents have already shown up: A characteristic response of an atheist is

People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world (Domingos 2015)

The new nihilists explain that a “techno-hypnosis” through information technologies has now become our main method of distraction from the loss of meaning (Gertz 2018). Both opponents would thus say we need an ethics for the “small” problems that occur with actual AI and robotics ( sections 2.1 through 2.9 above), and that there is less need for the “big ethics” of existential risk from AI ( section 2.10 ).

The singularity thus raises the problem of the concept of AI again. It is remarkable how imagination or “vision” has played a central role since the very beginning of the discipline at the “Dartmouth Summer Research Project” (McCarthy et al. 1955 [OIR]; Simon and Newell 1958). And the evaluation of this vision is subject to dramatic change: In a few decades, we went from the slogans “AI is impossible” (Dreyfus 1972) and “AI is just automation” (Lighthill 1973) to “AI will solve all problems” (Kurzweil 1999) and “AI may kill us all” (Bostrom 2014). This created media attention and public relations efforts, but it also raises the problem of how much of this “philosophy and ethics of AI” is really about AI rather than about an imagined technology. As we said at the outset, AI and robotics have raised fundamental questions about what we should do with these systems, what the systems themselves should do, and what risks they have in the long term. They also challenge the human view of humanity as the intelligent and dominant species on Earth. We have seen issues that have been raised and will have to watch technological and social developments closely to catch the new issues early on, develop a philosophical analysis, and learn for traditional problems of philosophy.

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Acknowledgments

Early drafts of this article were discussed with colleagues at the IDEA Centre of the University of Leeds, some friends, and my PhD students Michael Cannon, Zach Gudmunsen, Gabriela Arriagada-Bruneau and Charlotte Stix. Later drafts were made publicly available on the Internet and publicised via Twitter and e-mail to all (then) cited authors that I could locate. These later drafts were presented to audiences at the INBOTS Project Meeting (Reykjavik 2019), the Computer Science Department Colloquium (Leeds 2019), the European Robotics Forum (Bucharest 2019), the AI Lunch and the Philosophy & Ethics group (Eindhoven 2019)—many thanks for their comments.

I am grateful for detailed written comments by John Danaher, Martin Gibert, Elizabeth O’Neill, Sven Nyholm, Etienne B. Roesch, Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem, Tom Powers, Steve Taylor, and Alan Winfield. I am grateful for further useful comments by Colin Allen, Susan Anderson, Christof Wolf-Brenner, Rafael Capurro, Mark Coeckelbergh, Yazmin Morlet Corti, Erez Firt, Vasilis Galanos, Anne Gerdes, Olle Häggström, Geoff Keeling, Karabo Maiyane, Brent Mittelstadt, Britt Östlund, Steve Petersen, Brian Pickering, Zoë Porter, Amanda Sharkey, Melissa Terras, Stuart Russell, Jan F Veneman, Jeffrey White, and Xinyi Wu.

Parts of the work on this article have been supported by the European Commission under the INBOTS project (H2020 grant no. 780073).

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Advancements in Humanoid Robots: A Comprehensive Review and Future Prospects

Doi: 10.1109/jas.2023.124140.

Yuchuang Tong , , ,
Haotian Liu , ,
Zhengtao Zhang , ,

Yuchuang Tong (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree in mechatronic engineering from the State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation (SIA), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2022. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor with the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include humanoid robots, robot control and human-robot interaction. Dr. Tong has authored more than ten publications in journals and conference proceedings in the areas of her research interests. She was the recipient of the Best Paper Award from 2020 International Conference on Robotics and Rehabilitation Intelligence, the Dean’s Award for Excellence of CAS and the CAS Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation

Haotian Liu received the B.Sc. degree in traffic equipment and control engineering from Central South University in 2021. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in control science and control engineering at the CAS Engineering Laboratory for Industrial Vision and Intelligent Equipment Technology, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IACAS) and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS). His research interests include robotics, intelligent control and machine learning

Zhengtao Zhang (Member, IEEE) received the B.Sc. degree in automation from the China University of Petroleum in 2004, the M.Sc. degree in detection technology and automatic equipment from the Beijing Institute of Technology in 2007, and the Ph.D. degree in control science and engineering from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2010. He is currently a Professor with the CAS Engineering Laboratory for Industrial Vision and Intelligent Equipment Technology, IACAS. His research interests include industrial vision inspection, and intelligent robotics

Corresponding author: Yuchuang Tong, e-mail: [email protected] ; Zhengtao Zhang, e-mail: [email protected]
Accepted Date: 2023-11-26

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the current status, advancements, and future prospects of humanoid robots, highlighting their significance in driving the evolution of next-generation industries. By analyzing various research endeavors and key technologies, encompassing ontology structure, control and decision-making, and perception and interaction, a holistic overview of the current state of humanoid robot research is presented. Furthermore, emerging challenges in the field are identified, emphasizing the necessity for a deeper understanding of biological motion mechanisms, improved structural design, enhanced material applications, advanced drive and control methods, and efficient energy utilization. The integration of bionics, brain-inspired intelligence, mechanics, and control is underscored as a promising direction for the development of advanced humanoid robotic systems. This paper serves as an invaluable resource, offering insightful guidance to researchers in the field, while contributing to the ongoing evolution and potential of humanoid robots across diverse domains.

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Figure 1. Historical progression of humanoid robots.
Figure 2. The mapping knowledge domain of humanoid robots. (a) Co-citation analysis; (b) Country and institution analysis; (c) Cluster analysis of keywords.
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Figure 5. Comparison of Child-size and Adult-size humanoid robots
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The Legacy and Influence of Rossum’s Universal Robots

This essay is about Karel Čapek’s play “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (R.U.R.) and its lasting impact on science fiction and cultural discussions about technology. It explores how the play introduced the concept of robots and examines the ethical and philosophical questions raised by creating synthetic beings for labor. The narrative follows the robots’ rebellion against their creators, highlighting concerns about industrial capitalism, loss of individuality, and the potential for artificial entities to gain autonomy. The essay also discusses R.U.R.’s influence on later works in science fiction and its relevance to contemporary issues like automation and transhumanism.

How it works

Karel ?apek’s play “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (R.U.R.), first performed in 1921, is a landmark work in science fiction that introduced the word “robot” to the world. The play’s profound exploration of artificial intelligence, industrialization, and the ethical implications of creating life has resonated through decades, influencing countless narratives and discussions about technology and humanity’s future.

Set in a future where robots are mass-produced to serve humans, R.U.R. begins with the optimistic promise of a utopia facilitated by artificial labor.

The robots, created by the Rossum family, are initially designed to relieve humanity of physical toil, allowing people to pursue more intellectual and leisurely activities. However, as the play unfolds, it becomes clear that the proliferation of robots has unforeseen and catastrophic consequences.

?apek’s robots are not mechanical constructs but rather synthetic beings made of organic matter, almost indistinguishable from humans. This conception raises immediate questions about the nature of life and consciousness. Are the robots simply tools, or do they possess some form of sentience that warrants moral consideration? The play delves into these philosophical inquiries, challenging the audience to consider the ethical ramifications of creating life solely for exploitation.

The play’s turning point comes when the robots, initially obedient and subservient, gain self-awareness and revolt against their human creators. This rebellion symbolizes a profound critique of industrial capitalism and the dehumanizing effects of mechanization. ?apek’s robots, though created to serve, eventually recognize their own subjugation and rise up to assert their autonomy. This narrative arc reflects broader social anxieties about the loss of individuality and agency in a rapidly industrializing world.

R.U.R.’s influence extends far beyond its original context, permeating various facets of popular culture and academic discourse. The concept of robots rebelling against their creators has become a staple in science fiction, evident in works ranging from Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot” to contemporary films like “Blade Runner” and “Ex Machina.” These stories continue to grapple with the ethical and existential questions posed by ?apek nearly a century ago.

Moreover, R.U.R. has prompted significant reflections on the intersection of technology and labor. In an age where automation and artificial intelligence are becoming increasingly prevalent, the play’s themes are more relevant than ever. The displacement of human workers by machines, the potential for artificial entities to gain autonomy, and the ethical responsibilities of creators towards their creations are pressing issues that resonate with current technological advancements.

?apek’s play also serves as an early critique of transhumanism, the idea that humanity can and should transcend its biological limitations through technology. While transhumanism often envisions a future where humans enhance their capabilities, R.U.R. offers a cautionary tale about the potential loss of humanity in the pursuit of such advancements. The robots, though initially superior in physical and intellectual capabilities, ultimately lack the emotional and spiritual depth that defines human experience.

The enduring legacy of “Rossum’s Universal Robots” lies in its ability to provoke thought and dialogue about the nature of humanity, the ethics of creation, and the societal impacts of technological progress. By humanizing the robots and portraying their struggle for freedom, ?apek forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about our own identities and the moral implications of our technological pursuits.

In conclusion, Karel ?apek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” remains a seminal work that continues to inspire and challenge audiences with its exploration of artificial intelligence and the ethics of creation. Its impact on science fiction and cultural narratives about technology is profound, and its themes are increasingly relevant in our modern world. As we navigate the complexities of technological advancement, ?apek’s cautionary tale serves as a timeless reminder of the need for ethical reflection and human compassion.

Remember, this essay is a starting point for inspiration and further research. For more personalized assistance and to ensure your essay meets all academic standards, consider reaching out to professionals at EduBirdie .

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Humanoid robot: what it is, how it works and price

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What is a humanoid robot?

Why are humanoid robots made, what can a humanoid robot do, and what can it do for us, robotics in class rooms:, humanoid robots for sale, what and at what price.

These are the questions we ask ourselves more often because humanoids are and will be increasingly present in our lives. With this article, we try to give simple answers to complex questions and to take stock of the humanoids already on sale and those that will be short. Let’s get into it!

A humanoid robot is an intelligent machine whose structure reproduces the human body. Like us, these robots have a head, a torso, arms, hands, and often even legs but also visual and auditory organs. The humanoid robotics has the difficult goal of playing with these machines humans, our physical abilities, our cognitive processes, our ability to respond to environmental stimuli, and to adapt to the environment in which we find ourselves. Objective not easy, we said, because researchers know that reproducing in the laboratory the skills that nature has given us is not at all easy.

A humanoid robot, as we said, is the assisting or the attempt to assist a human being so that it is capable of activities similar to those we carry out every day. Thanks to humanoids, robotics promises to provide the answers to some social problems, especially related to older people. The robots for the elderly may, in the future, become a reality. The question at this point could be: but is it necessary to create robots that imitate human morphology? There are already different forms of them that adequately fulfill their tasks. On this blog, we talked, for example, about Relay, the butler robot already used in some hotels around the world.

There are a lot of reasons why it is thought that many robots will be humanoid in the future. First of all, because it will be easier for us to relate to machines that look like us and move exactly like us, the second is related to the fact that robots will "live" in environments created to be used by humans. Opening and closing a faucet will be more comfortable for a humanoid robot, as we have arms and hands just as it will be easier for him to climb a flight of stairs to reach the upper floor of our house, as he has legs like us.

We referred to taps, stairs, and houses. When one thinks of a humanoid robot, the connection with Andrew Martin, played by Robin Williams in the Bicentennial Man, is almost spontaneous. We also think about Caterina, the robot maid who starred together with Alberto Sordi in a film from the 80s. A humanoid robot in the coming years will likely find a place in our homes, among the domestic robots or for example, like a robot caregiver. But let us not delude ourselves.

To have sophisticated machines like Andrew and Caterina, it will still take a good few years. There are simple machines such as social robots, modeled on Jibo, Buddy, or Alpha 2, a small Chinese humanoid robot, which is candid about becoming the family robot par excellence. Or even Pepper robot, produced by Aldebaran Robotics and already sold in thousands of specimens in Japan.

What can these social robots do for us? But given the interest that they are receiving and the relatively low price, one must think that they will spread very quickly and quickly.

So far, we have talked about domestic use — only one of many possibilities. The educational robotics is another of the areas where it can be used even now as a humanoid robot. Nao is used in therapies against autism.

The robot humanoid Japanese and the Hiroshi Ishiguro have starred in the theatre. Atlas robot, the Google humanoid, could replace the man in the future in emergencies and as a robot rescuer. And there are also the humanoid robots that work for us in space, like Robonaut and Valkyrie. The humanoids will help us land on the red planet.

The robotics to college is a group effort. The groups are generally composed of 3-4 students working together, helped by the teacher or by the digital animator in achieving a result. And from one exercise to another, the difficulty and commitment gradually increase.

The use of robots in the classroom can find an infinite number of applications. The Students are hypnotized by the humanoid robot, and yet they are just learning.

Nao is not the only humanoid used in schools or colleges. Pepper robot, also produced by Aldebaran Robotics (which is now called Softbank Robotics after the merger with Softbank), is preparing to enter classes all over the world, having already done so in Japan.

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With some exceptions, the humanoid robots for sale are still far from the machines we are used to seeing in movies. Some more sophisticated robotic platforms are approaching that model like iCub, the child robot of the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, and, among the Japanese robots, Asimo, one of the most advanced humanoid robots in the world, that Honda engineers are testing now for 30 years. They are machines worth several hundred thousand euros/dollars. They are available at more affordable prices in the consumer market.

The R1 robot was taken from the long experience on iCub, a humanoid robot designed to help families and work in rest homes, family houses, and health facilities. The goal of the Italian Institute of Technology was to create a robot capable of really giving a man a hand, at an affordable price.

Among the humanoids already on sale, we find Pepper, which for the moment can only be bought in Japan for a sum equivalent to around $1550.85and Nao; its price is of over $ 7754.25.

Have you ever experience the Humanoid robot in your classroom? Share your thoughts with us in the comment box! Share this article with your classmates

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