Abstract

How can we design robotic technology that responsibly supports human flourishing and does not bring more issues than it solves to our planet?
Designers, researchers, and stakeholders have the responsibility to reflect on the values, perspectives, biases, and stereotypes they embed in embodied AI technology (smart objects, robots, conversational user interfaces). There is the need to inspect narratives, practices, and methods with reflexivity and openness to shift mindsets.
Traditionally, designers and engineers are not trained to include reflection and practices that tackle social inequity; thus -- willingly or unwillingly-- encode particular (negative) values into the systems they design. At times, designers, developers, and engineers claim that their designs' racist, sexist, ableist results are entirely exterior to the development process. They have not included judgments, biases, stereotypes, and values in technical systems. Therefore, it is essential to nurture awareness of the narratives and the values that inform technology development and update methods, techniques, and ways of working to develop the technology.
In this talk, I will illustrate how to apply critical computing and design lenses to the development of Embodied AI. To do so, I will introduce the audience to work done to design robothings for education. I will show how co-speculation with conversational user interfaces and children could help us create the future we want to experience. I will present the outcomes from transdisciplinary workshops to raise awareness of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), assess practices and define methods to design future embodied AI. Finally, I will sketch out the challenges of The Good Robots for the Future of Work project, which aims to systematically research enablers and barriers that engineers and other scientists face to responsibly co-design human-robot partnerships in the smart industry and provide transdisciplinary guidelines.