As part of this year’s Brain Week, the European Movement Croatia, the European House Zagreb, and the Scientific Center of Excellence for Integrative Bioethics (ZCI-IB) organized a Round Table on the topic of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: State, Trends, and Challenges.
The moderator of the panel, Professor Emeritus Igor Čatić, emphasized that actions within cyborgization, robotization, and digitalization directly affect and will increasingly affect the human being, which is gradually becoming transhuman.
An introduction to the topic of artificial intelligence and machine learning was given by Professor Jan Šnajder, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb, highlighting that artificial intelligence is among us and citing examples such as Google Translate, Pandora, Google Assistant, Dating.ai, Netflix, Uber’s price estimation, security surveillance, and computer games.
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In the second part of his lecture ‘Artificial Intelligence and Society: Today and Tomorrow’, Šnajder pointed out that we already have unwanted consequences of technology’s impact today.
– Recent failures show that companies are unable to predict unwanted consequences, said Šnajder.
He emphasized that if superintelligence ever occurs, there would be three types – rapid, collective, and qualitative superintelligence.
Tomislav Stipančić, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture at the University of Zagreb, spoke about how machines can reason using context within the topic ‘Context-Driven Robotics’.
– We need to use robots as our extended arm. Today’s robots are mainly powered by explicit information. Scientific dreams go further as we see robots as partners, interacting with humans and their environment, exhibiting emergent behavior and understanding concepts, said Stipančić.
He also emphasized that robots are not perceived as tools or devices but often as social actors that stimulate human social reactions.
