Robotics and AI: New Perspectives was presented by the Lemelson Center on 1-4 November 2022. Check back soon for the session recordings.
Over the past few decades, we have integrated robots and artificial intelligence (AI) into our daily lives. Robots assemble automobiles, deliver pizzas, and provide companionship. Intelligent algorithms embedded in these and other technologies track our behavior, recommend social media content, suggest potential purchases, and encourage beneficial diet, exercise, and sleep patterns.
But automated, intelligent systems also create new risks and concerns. Algorithmic biases encoded in these systems can perpetuate negative stereotypes and amplify social harms against underserved groups. Many observers fear that robots and artificial intelligence will take our jobs, eliminate our digital privacy, and put our society at risk.
As inventors, engineers, and computer scientists continue to develop and refine intelligent systems, the public often has a limited understanding of their reach and consequences. What ordinary people do know about robots and AI is often shaped by sci-fi characters such as C-3PO and Ultron; these fictional representations, in turn, influence some practitioners’ real-life designs.
Meanwhile, the public must navigate a complex high-tech media landscape that includes corporate messaging, critical commentary, and news reporting that strains to keep pace with a rapidly advancing technological frontier.
There are differences in the ways the public, scholars, and high-tech practitioners perceive these smart machines; this symposium explores the contours of those gaps.
Through critical, cross-disciplinary dialogue, our expert panelists—including roboticists, computer scientists, historians, journalists, economists, social scientists, cultural critics, and policymakers—will engage with our online audience to articulate the social benefits, negative impacts, and future prospects for innovations in robots and artificial intelligence.
Circular image at top: Sheet music for the song, “March for A Robot,” by Ada Richter, published by M. Witmark and Sons, New York City 1935. NMAH 1983.0830.13. © Smithsonian Institution; photo NMAH-AHB2008q03401