With the advance of technical systems, more and more intelligent and autonomous machines will populate our living space and challenge fundamentals of our society. Mobile devices, for instance have not only been changing how we interact with each other, but also - and more fundamentally - how we relate to each other, how we collaborate, and how we distribute work among human and machine agents. While autonomous cars are waiting to drive us around, robots will come to relief us from chores and dangerous, boring or dirty work.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered to be a transformative force that is bound to alter the fabric of society. The recent major advances in machine learning are revealing AI’s capacity as a general-purpose technology and push inventions in areas of mobility, healthcare, home & service robotics, education and cyber security, to name just a few. AI-enabled developments have promising capabilities to increase human well-being and to resolve, inter alia, the grand challenges associated with for instance our ageing society or climate change. At the same time, AI comes with risks and challenges associated to fundamental human rights, ethical issues and broader societal implications.

Thus, designing technology for people, requires that people are - at all times - either fully in control of the technology or that they can rely on the benevolent intentions and the security of autonomous systems that they cannot control. Therefore, the idea is to develop trustworthy intelligent systems. In the research area Social Robotics and AI, we therefore focus on questions that are related to ethically aligned design of AI and robotic technologies, and their social and societal implications.

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