Privacy in the age of robotics

The proliferation of autonomous robots with embedded artificial intelligence is growing across industry sectors, bringing advanced capabilities and applications to public spaces. Our relationship with technology is changing too, as the integration of autonomous engagement in society increases.

Autonomous robots, such as Waymo's self driving car, Knightscope's security robot and Unitree's Go1 dog, are examples of the more adaptive and interactive AI-powered machines evolving to not only interact with us, but also identify humans. For cities and municipalities looking to adopt widespread, operational robot use, safe and ethical deployment is critical, as is the need for clear guidelines.

As existing privacy mitigations may be insufficient for human-robot interactions, a robotics privacy framework is necessary to promote privacy-preserving design in the responsible deployment of robots with embodied AI. Failure to address privacy issues in these novel interactions may cause significant harm and erode public trust.

Challenges in human environments

Robots are not new, but their existence with new capabilities in public human environments is. This raises several novel considerations.

Autonomous engagement. In traditional interactions between humans and technology, the user initiated and controlled the engagement. Much in the same way, a user initiates an interaction by downloading an app or types in the URL address of a website. With autonomous robots, a robot can now initiate engagement with a human.

Embodied AI creates a new user experience, where professionals in Silicon Valley, like myself, are already familiar, but humans in metropolitan areas will soon interact with a robot's autonomous behavior for the first time.