Robophilosophy 2024 (RP2024) was the sixth event in the biennial Robophilosophy Conference Series, inaugurated ten years ago in 2014 here at Aarhus University. In content, disciplinary scope, spirit, and societal relevance, it proved to be just the kind of intense event for international research exchange that we had hoped for to celebrate a decade of robophilosophy. In view of this anniversary, we want to present this year’s conference within its temporal context, looking back at the development of the research area as manifested in the events of the RP series, and looking ahead to the decade to come.

There is one factor which – rather surprisingly – has remained constant throughout the past decade. From its outset until today, the RP series has featured among ‘the world’s largest conferences for humanities research in and on social robotics’. Robophilosophy conferences are typically multitrack events with 80-120 research contributions and 200-400 participants. While large for the humanities, this size of such research events cannot compare to the enormous annual professional meetings in other disciplines. Given that social robotics has been hailed as the signature technology of the automation age, and given that the humanities arguably plays an indispensable role in successful social robotics, it is surprising that the comparatively small events of the RP series are still the largest international events facilitating research exchange in this area. This year’s event followed the pattern of the series in terms of size and organization: RP 2024 was a multi-track conference featuring 128 research talks (8 plenaries, 62 research talks in 18 sessions, and 58 workshop talks in 11 workshops, as well as 5 contributions to art and performance) contributed by 174 researchers from 26 countries and four continents, and presented for an audience of close to 300 participants, both in-person and online, from all around the world.

Another factor that has stably characterised Robophilosophy conferences is a unique aspiration to reach for the wide interdisciplinary scope that is required to address the empirical, technical, and political, but especially also the ethical, cultural, and existential questions, of the technological revolution that we are currently witnessing. Here we can discern a positive development. The goal of genuine cross- faculty interdisciplinarity is increasingly better realised – more researchers from the technical sciences are joining. With contributors from 39 different academic disciplines, RP2024 had greater interdisciplinary scope than previous events; importantly, over a third of the contributors to RP2024 have their professional training in technical and scientific disciplines (social robotics, cognitive robotics, biorobotics, cognitive science, neuroscience, computer science) etc.

Judging from the statistics of the conference series, this development towards greater interdisciplinarity is supported by a change in the research landscape of the applied humanities themselves; while at RP2014, contributors predominantly had traditional departmental affiliations, at RP2024, most of the contributors from the humanities and social sciences were also members of interdisciplinary research centres or project teams.

In our view, such changes in affiliation go hand in hand with the changes in the research focus of robophilosophy over the past decade. The label ‘robophilosophy’ covers three dimensions of philosophical research – it is defined as ‘philosophy of, for, and by social robotics’. The term ‘philosophy’ in this definition refers to the research activities of philosophers, but at RP conferences the term ‘robophilosphy’ is typically taken in a wider sense, as a stand-in for humanities and social sciences (SSH) research into and on social robotics more broadly. The three dimensions (of, for, and by) of research intentions (reflective, pro-active/collaborative, and revisionary) apply to robophilosophy in both its narrow and wider readings, and the following description of the past development of the research landscape of robophilosophy in its narrow sense also has resonances in the development of SSH research in and on social robotics more broadly (For a more detailed exposition of the three dimensions of robophilosophy see chapter 1 of Robophilosophy—Philosophy of, for, and by Social Robotics, ed. by J. Seibt, R. Hakli, and M. Nørskov, MIT Press 2025.).

In the early days of robo-ethics (introduced by Gianmarco Verruggio in 2002) and robophilosophy (introduced in 2013), researchers mainly contributed to the dimension of the philosophy of social robotics, offering reflections on the ethical, and more broadly, socio-cultural significance of the vision of social robots, i.e., robots that are designed to be able to move and act in the physical and symbolic spaces of human social interactions. Increasingly, however, and certainly from 2016 onwards, the purely reflective stance of the philosophy of social robotics was accompanied by and soon replaced by the collaborative stance of philosophy for social robotics. Here the specific methods and theoretical tools of philosophy (and SSH research) are used for the sake of responsible (culturally sustainable, positive, etc.) development of technology in social robotics. Importantly, however, this second dimension of robophilosophy does not only draw on philosophical ethics. For example, in 2010 Selma Sabanoviç (anthropology) was early to promote a collaborative design programme for the ‘mutual shaping of society and technology’ supported by the use of SSH methods (ethnographic research and other methods of qualitative research) during the development of technology in social robotics. Similarly, in 2016, Kerstin Fischer (linguistics) demonstrated the productive use of methods of conversational analysis for human-robot interaction (HRI) research. Moreover, philosophers increasingly applied the analytical methods and concepts of the theoretical disciplines within philosophy (ontology and social ontology in particular, as well as philosophy of the mind, phenomenology and social phenomenology, and the philosophy of science/technology) to support the research discourse in HRI. These conceptual tools were offered (i) to increase terminological precision in HRI and social robotics, and/or (ii) to support the interdisciplinary integration of these young multidisciplinary research areas. These resources and methods, produced by the collaborative stance of philosophy (SSH research) for social robotics, have been finding an increasing response: since RP 2020 we have seen a trend towards greater receptiveness in HRI and social-robotics research of the contributions of SSH research, with more direct involvement of researchers from robotics. The demography and content of RP2024 also demonstrates this quite clearly: half of the workshops and close to 50% of the session talks present the results of research collaborations on technology design and development, integrating expertise from the technical sciences and SSH research.

The third dimension of robophilosophy, philosophy by social robotics, has also received more attention since 2020, in tandem with the technological advances in AI research. This metaphilosophical dimension of robophilosophy could currently even be said to be in the foreground, part of the impression of the achievements of multimodal generative AI-systems, as is documented by the content of this year’s conference. Philosophy by social robotics means that philosophers and SSH researchers take a self- critical and constructive stance, and investigate how the new type of highly intelligent social robots challenge traditional core assumptions in philosophy and other SSH disciplines about mind, consciousness, agency, autonomy, and emotional intelligence, together with the role of these capacities in social interaction.

Of course, the three dimensions of robophilosophy, the of, for, and by, are always intertwined. At RP 2014 (Social Robotics and the Future of Social Relations) we explored the metaphilosophical significance of social robotics, pointing out the clash between the empirical results of HRI and the traditional (Cartesian) model of subjectivity, i.e., the dominant traditional metaphysical division into subjects and objects, which precludes normative competence for social actions in non-conscious agents. Genuine progress has been made along the second dimension (philosophy for social robotics) in the past decade by rejecting the traditional model of subjectivity, both for practical purposes (the issues of robot rights, sentimentalism, nudging) and for the theoretical modelling of human-robot interactions, and the assault on the traditional idea of sociality as an allegedly exceptional capacity in humans (philosophy by social robotics) has led to productive new accounts of sociality (philosophy for social robotics).

Ten years later, the metaphilosophical challenges now reach even deeper into the foundations of our self-comprehension. The achievements of multi-modal AI-systems, which, particularly when embodied in robots, complete the loop between perception, thought, and action, seem to amount to an empirical proof of behaviourism and functionalism. Several of the short papers collected here explore the limits of what current simulations of mentality can achieve, but also, in the sense of philosophy for robotics, how a differentiated description of human mental capacity can assist us in gauging more precisely what social robots equipped with AI can and should do.

Looking into the future: which of the three dimensions of robophilosophy will be most important in the years to come? Will the next decade push us robophilosophers (i.e., philosophers and SSH researchers) back to a purely reflective stance where we merely observe, report, and comment on deeply transformative, socio-cultural changes? Will politics allow technology companies to proceed independently of socio-cultural expertise and value considerations, driven by monetary gain alone – or, even worse – by the TESCREAL ideology of Silicon Valley? (https://www.dair-institute.org/tescreal/) Or will politics or the social robotics community find their way towards paradigms of R&D processes that operate with multidisciplinary developer teams in which philosophers and SSH researchers can work for successful value-preserving or value-enhancing social robotics applications? Will lead researchers in robotics who are also protagonists of an ethical, reflective approach and have, throughout the years, supported the RP series, such as Raja Chatila, Alan Winfied, Aurélie Clodic, and Rachid Alami, be able to convince their colleagues of the benefits of integrating SSH expertise into application development? Will people be obliged to adjust to robots, or will we discover ways to create human-robot interactions that preserve and enhance what we value about humanity?

Predictions are impossible in this current climate of unusual political uncertainty. The outlook for the next decade can only take the form of a commitment: to try to uphold all three dimensions of robophilosophical research, and to work, in particular, for the second dimension of pro-active collaboration.

From its very beginning the RP conference series has stood under the banner of Sherry Turkle’s observation that we currently ‘live the robotic moment’ of human cultural history, when ‘we need to decide who we are and who we are willing to become’ (S. Turkle. Alone Together. New York, Basic Books; 2011, p.26.). It seemed to us, during the planning stage of the conference in September 2023, that the robotic moment had reached a decisive phase. Multimodal, generative AI-systems bring us closer to the longstanding vision of personalising robots and using them everywhere in our lives, both at work and at home. Thus, for the first time, we have widened the scope of an RP conference somewhat to include discussion of AI- systems – albeit in relation to their embodiment in robots. Accordingly, many of the research contributions to RP2024 collected here take account, explicity and implicitly, of this new development, investigating the socio-cultural and ethical implications of social robots with AI-systems, as well as such systems with simulated social and mental capacities.

In this sense, RP2024 has already provided a new perspective from which to consider social robotics into the next decade. There are three further features of RP2024 that are characteristic for the series, and which will, we hope, accompany it into the future. We particularly want to mention them here as they are not documented in the proceedings. First, RP2024 hosted 11 workshops which prompted intense and well-focused discussion. Despite some being supplemented by short papers from the contributors, the descriptions of the workshops collected here do not, and could not, capture the performative productivity of these encounters. Similarly, the conference included five art sessions, and even though two descriptions are included, these artworks will live on in the experiential memory of the audience as performances and experiences. Finally, RP2024 attracted many early-career researchers and newcomers to robophilosophy, while also benefitting from the presence of established international protagonists in the field. This enabled constructive engagement, not only across disciplines but also across academic ages. The friendly, collaborative atmosphere, typical for all RP conferences so far, together with a steadily growing community spirit, will serve well to carry us into the next decade. AI systems may surpass us in all we can do, but never in all we can be for each other.

Aarhus, October 2024,

Johanna Seibt, Peter Fazekas, and Oliver Santiago Quick