The recent technological leap in AI capacities can be expected to engender a transformative paradigm shift in social robotics. Multimodal AI’s will soon allow social robots to respond to human verbal commands with autonomously generated simulations of human actions. In fact, social robots can be expected to act in a context-adequate fashion and to generate novel intentions.

Multimodal AI thus represent a major step towards the longstanding vision of social roboticists to integrate robots “everywhere” into our lives, “at work and at home,” and to “personalize” robots. Multimodal AI will be a  game-changer for the equally longstanding socio-cultural concerns arising with this technology: how will social robots, with their radically improved practical ad simulatory skills,  affect societies and individuals: our economies, social practices, human social and intimate relations? As the margin of ‘humans-only’ competences is dwindling, how will this affect our cultural and individual self-comprehension?

We live “the robotic moment” in human cultural history where we need to determine “who we are and who we are willing to become” (Sherry Turkle)—and now we have entered a decisive phase. Many AI researchers clearly perceive the risks of generative AI. These risks amplify when AI’s embedded in social robots can act out their “hallucinations”.  But risk management for social robots goes far beyond safety considerations—when artificial agents act in the physical and symbolic space of human social interactions, risk management requires expertise in analyzing the complex domain of social practices and human experiences.

The aim of the international research conference RP2024 is to address the deep and far-reaching questions raised by recent advances in AI on the basis of the required research expertise.  RP2024 will  bring together international researchers from all relevant disciplines, from social robotics and AI research, but especially also from Humanities and social science research in HRI (Human-Robot Interact research).  The special ambition of RP2024 is to produce actionable knowledge based on professional engagement of the foundational issues—only in this fashion we can move beyond well-intentioned proclamations and address the expectable socio-cultural transformations of societies by social robotics in a responsible fashion.

RP2024 is the sixth event in the Robophilosophy Conference Series, which since 2014 has featured the world’s largest events for Humanities research in and on social robotics. Given the urgency of research-based regulations, experts on society and experts on technology need to collaborate. RP2024 challenges Humanities researchers to showcase concretely how conceptual and phenomenological research can contribute to this collaborative effort; and RP2024 challenges engineers who take their new responsibilities seriously to contribute technical facts and prospects.