A future living with robots isn’t science fiction — it’s practical, messy and already here #TEDTalks

This is Toba, the robot that I live with at home. Every day with Toba unears this really wide range of practical issues. And in turn, that highlights the need for regulation in a really wide variety of spaces. Lesson one, you have to robotroof your home. See, Tova walks and runs and TOVA gestures. Autonomous, robotics, liability, and insurance coverage is a field where practicality and immersion, they're going to create precedents on any number of different issues, right? We need to answer questions like, I own the robot. The company programmed the robot and my friend is operating the robot and the robot knocks over a vase. Who's responsible? Lesson two, transit with a robot is really rough. Tova weighs like 60 kilos and packs into this like giant black crate. So calling cabs for giant black boxes, it gets expensive. I take the tram. The robot has legs. The robot can just walk on the tram and sit down, right? Then I thought, okay, what if the ticket inspector comes, right? It needs a ticket if it's going to be taking up a seat. Lesson three is that robots aren't always welcome. I have a domestic robot, so it's not really wanted or needed in the faculty rooms at the university where I work, and it hasn't been permitted to visit houses of worship. These restrictions and requests, they're completely informal, but they're completely respected by me. What happens when thousands or millions of these robots are shipped all over the world? So, we really need to formulate community standards. And the community standards can talk about where the robots are welcome, where they're not, what they can do, what they can't do. And it could kind of be like where we let e- scooters and ebikes go. Or this could be like when you go to the supermarket and they say no pets are allowed in the icon in the window and be decided upon like a policy each building or business. I ask that we bring these discussions down into reality, that we embrace the practical nature of life alongside embodied AI as we prepare to regulate the future together.