Cross-Disciplinary Reflections: Philosophical Robotics

Introduction

This chapter reports work done mostly by one member of the team – a philosopher with substantial AI programming experience, whose primary interests were in the very long term goals of the project, summarised in Chapter 1, including the goal of shedding light on problems solved by biological evolution, and who was not directly involved in the coding but who interacted closely with people who were, and with people outside the project, in several related disciplines. The majority of the work reported here is concerned with requirements, and gaps between those requirements and the current state-of-the-art in AI/Robotics, and related disciplines. A key feature of this work is its emphasis on study of aspects of the 3-D environment we and other animals inhabit, with which a Fido-like intelligent domestic robot (described in Chapter 1) would need to interact. This is an essential part of a strategy for developing a roadmap to bridge the gaps in the long term.