Fall 2024 GRASP on Robotics: Damion Shelton, Agility Robotics, “What do we want from our machines?”

This was a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance…

ABSTRACT

In 2022 I represented Agility Robotics at the first “Philadelphia Summit” on the weaponization of autonomous robots, co-hosted by the GRASP lab and Boston Dynamics. By late fall, this yielded a joint statement, signed by Agility, Boston Dynamics, and others, with the self-explanatory title “General Purpose Robots Should Not Be Weaponized”. But why general purpose robots? And why now? After that summit, a follow-up conference, “Ethical and Legal Dilemmas of Autonomous Weapons in War and National Security”, was hosted by CERL in 2024, against the backdrop of the Ukraine war and growing public awareness of the role of drones and other semi-autonomous weapons systems. While this event has not (yet) yielded a specific industry response, it further refines the concept of perceived harm from 2022 by adding the explicit call-out that the ethical and legal dilemmas of mobile robots are inseparably tied to autonomy. Further, virtually the entirety of modern generative AI awareness, including among industry experts, has come to pass since the original 2022 event.

The purpose of this talk is twofold. First, humanoid robots – since they look like us, occupy our spaces, and are able to perform tasks in a manner similar to us – are the ultimate instantiation of “general purpose” robots. What are the ethical, legal, and social implications of this sort of technology? Are robots like Digit actually different from a pick and place machine, or a Roomba? And second, does this situation change when you add advanced AI?

Over and above the focus of the 2022 and 2024 summits, this talk will evaluate a broader set of axes than just robots as weapons. Since we are still in the early days of both modern AI and commercialized humanoid robots, we have the opportunity to ask a more general question: “What do we want from our machines?”