Bruno Siciliano at Planetary Health Festival 2024

Robotics scientist Bruno Siciliano, who has been in Robotics for 40 years, participated in Planetary Health Festival 2024, which opened with the wish and appeal ‘planetary health is the health of human civilisation and the state of the natural systems on which it depends’.

Bruno Siciliano developed the theme of the ELSE (Ethical, Legal, Societal, and Economic) aspects of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Among the proposed thoughts,  the one for which future and decisive advances in Robotics will take place at the crossroads with other fields, thanks to the contamination with other sciences and disciplines, Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and with disciplines not necessarily of ‘hard science’ such as Psychology, Sociology, Ethology.

The vision of a ‘technological humanism’,’ Siciliano proposed, ’requires that machines, robots, can alleviate human fatigue and make our lives happier as long as they perform tasks that are functional to our humanity. The precious time they offer, performing boring and repetitive tasks, should paradoxically be time that we can occupy in less artificial and more natural activities, such as those of creativity, emotionality, faith.

The scientist has therefore developed a new concept, whereby technology, which is organised to provide homogeneous, neutral answers, is to be used by us to do the opposite: to take positions, to take responsibility, to make decisions. So that humans are always central to technology. This determines the characteristic of diversity that is inherent to humans and, as we have seen, to life on the planet.

Videos of Bruno Siciliano’s speeches 8in Italian) here

Questions and answers here