The social separation imposed by the pandemic led us to rely on technology to an extent we might never have imagined – from Teams and Zoom to online banking and vaccine status apps.
Now, society faces an increasing number of decisions about our relationship with technology. For example, do we want our workforce needs fulfilled by automation, migrant workers, or an increased birth rate?
In the coming years, we will also need to balance technological innovation with people’s wellbeing – both in terms of the work they do and the social support they receive.
And there is the question of trust. When humans should trust robots, and vice versa, is a question our Trust Node team is researching as part of the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems hub. We want to better understand human-robot interactions – based on an individual’s propensity to trust others, the type of robot, and the nature of the task. This, and projects like it, could ultimately help inform robot design.
…some service tasks assigned to robots are more controversial, because they could be seen as taking jobs from humans
This is an important time to discuss what roles we want robots and AI to take in our collective future – before decisions are taken that may prove hard to reverse. One way to frame this dialogue is to think about the various roles robots can fulfil.
Robots as our servants
The word “robot” was first used by the Czech writer, Karel Čapek, in his 1920 sci-fi play Rossum’s Universal Robots. It comes from the word “robota”, meaning to do the drudgery or donkey work. This etymology suggests robots exist to do work that humans would rather not. And there should be no obvious controversy, for example, in tasking robots to maintain nuclear power plants or repair offshore wind farms.
However, some service tasks assigned to robots are more controversial, because they could be seen as taking jobs from humans.
