Robophilosophy2020: Culturally Sustainable Social Robotics

Are social robots the future of human social interactions-?  Is this one of the lessons to draw from our recent experiences with a pandemic?  Social robotics offer new possibilities to fulfill the "automation potential" associated with each profession (McKinsey 2017), and the European program "industry 4.0" calls for increased human-robot coworking.  But Humanities expertise is still sorely missing in research, development, and regulation of social robotics applicaitons. Robophilosophy2020, the fourth event in the biennial Robophilosophy Conference series, investigates how we can ensure that social robotics applications are culturally sustainable.  The conference addresses theoretical questions about adequate descriptions and conceptualizations of human-robot interactions, practical questions  in robo-ethics and machine ethics, as well as questions of method and design, but it also explores wider perspectives of cultural development.

The conference features over 70 talks (6 plenaries, 5 workshops, over 40 session talks); it will be online live, with discussion sessions on pre-recorded session talks.