Keynote

Kathleen Richardson, De Montfort University

Moving Beyond the Egocentric I and the Undifferentiated We: How to build robots informed by the politics of love and I-you attachment

Abstract: Robots have always been regarded as contentious figures, for humans as metaphors for slavery and exploitative work but more recently as companions, sexual partners, or co-workers. Did the robot really transform from one of property to become like humans? This talk will consider these issues drawing on a political-ethical pronominal framework of the “egocentric I”, the “undifferentiated we” and “I-you attachment”. It will explore the kinds of robotic technologies that could be produced if informed by embedding I-you attachments at their core and the building of a politics of love.

Kathleen Richardson is a Professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI at De Montfort University, Leicester. Her PhD fieldwork was an investigation of the making of robots in labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After her PhD Kathleen was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (BAPDF), a position she held at the University College London, where she studied the therapeutic uses of robots for children with autism spectrum conditions. In 2013, she was part of the Digital Bridges Project, an innovative AHRC funded technology and arts collaboration between Watford Palace Theatre and the University of Cambridge. Kathleen is the author of An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines (2015), Challenging Sociality: An Anthropology of Autism, Attachment and Robots (2018). And Kathleen co-edited The Sexual Politics of Sex Dolls and Sex Robots (2023). Her work examines the ethics, culture, women’s rights, child protection and the politics of representational technologies of the human. She has worked as a cultural ethicist on several European Commission funded projects including DREAM (Development of Robot-Enhanced Therapy for Children with Autism), REELER (Responsible Ethical Learning in Robotics), TECHETHOS (Ethics for Technologies with High Socio-Economic Impact) and SHARESPACE (Embodied Social Experiences in Hybrid Shared Spaces). In SHARESPACE she co-created a new ethics by design model called Good Enough Ethics. In 2015 she founded the Campaign Against Sex Robots (now Porn Robots) to warn of the dangers of erasing human relationships and reducing women and children to property. Her new book Sex Robots: The End of Love brings together a new political-ethical framework prioritising love and I-you attachment at its core.

Kaspar Althoefer, Queen Mary University London

Professor Kaspar Althoefer is a roboticist, leading research on Robotics at Queen Mary University of London. After graduating with a degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Technology Aachen, Germany, and obtaining a PhD in Robot Motion Planning from Kings College London, he joined the Kings Robotics Group in 1996 as a Lecturer. Made a Senior Lecturer in 2006, he was promoted to Reader and Professor in 2009 and 2011, respectively. In April 2016, he joined Queen Mary as full Professor of Robotics Engineering.

His current research interests are in the areas of robot autonomy, soft robotics, modelling of tool-environment interaction dynamics, tactile sensing and neuro-fuzzy-based sensor signal classification with applications in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, rehabilitation, assistive technologies and human-robot interactions in the manufacturing environment.

He was awarded more than £10 Million (as Principal Investigator (PI), price to funder) in competitive research funding from funding bodies such as the Wellcome Trust, EPSRC, Innovate UK, the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC); he strongly contributed to the attainment of further grants in excess of £50 Million, especially through collaboration with colleagues at St Thomas Hospital London focusing on creating robotic solutions for the healthcare sector. Prof Althoefer was the coordinator of two EU projects (STIFF-FLOP and CONPHIRMER), and PI/Co-I on numerous further EU, EPSRC, Innovate UK and industry-sponsored projects. He is currently one of four PIs of the £10 Million Synergy project EndoTheranostics, funded by the European Research Council (ERC).

Prof Althoefer has authored/co-authored more than 400 peer-reviewed papers. The majority of his journal papers are in the top journals of the field, including top transactions and journals of the IEEE and ASME and proceedings of the leading national learned societies in the field, IMechE and IET. He is named inventor on seven patent applications. His Google Scholar h-index is 71, and the number of citations to his work on Google Scholar exceeds 18,000.

He was the principal supervisor of more than 30 successful PhD students. He is currently heading a team of 10 PhD students and postdoctoral Research Associates.

Volkert van der Wijk, Delft University of Technology

Volkert van der Wijk obtained in 2014 his doctorate (Cum Laude) from the University of Twente (NL) with his research on the design of dynamically balanced mechanisms and he received the Wim van der Hoek DSPE Constructor Award 2008 for excellence in mechanical design engineering for his masterthesis (Cum Laude) at TU Delft (NL). In addition to his artistic work, he was a Research Fellow at King’s College London from 2015 to 2018 and an Assistant Professor at TU Delft (NL) from 2016 until 2023 and currently works as a Gentleman (independent) Scientist related to TU Delft (NL).

In 2017 Volkert van der Wijk was honored with the Constructor of Excellence 2017 Award* for his kinetic art sculpture Taaie Tiller and for his achievements in scientific research on dynamic balancing. (*issued annually by Dutch technology magazine Constructeur)