Most people’s opinion of robots is formed by video. That is a bad basis for a public debate about what these systems should be allowed to do, and it cuts both ways. It produces inflated expectations and inflated fears in equal measure.
I raised funding through the City of Winterthur’s co-creation programme to start an association dedicated to making physical AI publicly accessible: working systems that people can walk up to, operate, and form their own view about.
It builds on years of running demonstrators at ZHAW. An autonomous quadruped with camera and LIDAR that navigates, recognises gestures and plans its own actions, and a Swiss-German speech-to-image generator, taken to Scientifica and Digital Night Winterthur. The difference is that this puts the work on a permanent footing rather than an event-by-event one.