Contextual Lecture: The Thinking Robot

Alan Winfield, Professor of Robot Ethics at UWE Bristol will discuss issues around intelligent robots.

Press headlines frequently refer to robots that think like humans, or even have feelings, but is there any basis of truth in such headlines, or are they simply sensationalist hype? Computer scientist EW Dijkstra famously wrote, “the question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim”, but the question of robot thought is one that cannot so easily be dismissed. In this talk I will discuss the question “how intelligent are present day intelligent robots?” and describe recent efforts to design robots with simple artificial theory of mind.

This lecture is part of the 2018 Contextual Lecture Series: Tomorrow's World - Intimations of the Future.