Homo Roboticus

Are robots smarter than people? Will you end up with a robot as a workmate? Will you fall head over heels in love with a robot? Will robots be given a license to kill? Do robots make good surgeons? What if athletes become robots? Would you let a robot put your grandmother to bed? Won’t household robots wash your dirty linen in public? Thanks to cutting-edge technology, our living environment is changing rapidly. The combination of robotics and artificial intelligence has opened up a seemingly endless range of new possibilities, from self-driving cars to sex robots and killer bots. This technological revolution will drastically change our society, just as the industrial revolution did more than 250 years ago. How does man fit into this technological revolution? More than fifty professors and researchers have taken up this question, studying the ways in which technology can be further developed for the benefit of mankind. The book Homo Roboticus collates their answers and presents an inclusive robotic agenda along with recommendations for the present and the future. Homo Roboticus is the work of Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) think tank POINcaré and was created under the direction of An Jacobs (imec-SMIT, VUB), Lynn Tytgat (weKONEKT.brussels, VUB), Michel Maus (VUB - Bloomlaw), Romain Meeusen (MFYS, VUB), and Bram Vanderborght (Brubotics, VUB).