The novel capacities of multimodal generative AI have suddenly brought us much closer to the longstanding vision of ubiquitous social robotics. Robots may soon become part of everyday life, performing many services as well or better than humans. We have entered a decisive phase in the robotic moment of human cultural history, and it is more urgent than ever that we determine “who we are and who we are willing to become” (Sherry Turkle).
This book presents the proceedings of RP2024, the sixth event in the biennial Robophilosophy Conference Series, held from 20 to 23 August 2024 in Aarhus, Denmark. Robophilosophy conferences are the world’s largest events for fully interdisciplinary social-robotics research, featuring contributions from humanities and social-science research in HRI, robotics, AI research, and cognitive science, as well as art events.
RP2024 explored the questions of socio-cultural transformation that can be expected to ensue from the new technological potential of social robotics. As is characteristic for the conferences in this series, RP2024 addressed not only questions of concrete practice, but also the deeper theoretical and existential issues that reach far beyond safety and privacy concerns into the conceptual and normative fabric of our societies and our individual self-comprehension.
The book is divided into 3 parts. Part 1 contains abstracts of the 8 plenary sessions; Part 2 contains 55 session papers divided into 8 sections; and Part 3 contains details of the 10 workshops which formed part of the conference.
The book showcases the way in which technical empirical, conceptual and phenomenological research can make a concrete contribution to the necessary collaborative effort, and will be of interest to all those working in the field.
