Q&A: How will robotics shape our future? |Euronews Tech Talks
How is AI transforming robotics? Where will robotics be in 2030? In this episode of Euronews Tech Talks, we put these and more of your questions to Kai Olav Ellefsen, associate professor at the University of Oslo.
READ MORE : http://www.euronews.com/2025/11/27/qa-how-will-robotics-shape-our-future-euronews-tech-talks
Euronews Next is a future-focused news section covering global innovation, science and technology with a European perspective. Our dedicated team of journalists aims to educate and inspire today’s leaders by providing them with analysis and insights into the people and organisations shaping our future
00:00I think for robotics, sort of as a tool, a technology, and like all other technology,
00:06it won't really be safe and responsible unless the user of it is safe and responsible.
00:26Some robots have traditionally been used mainly for casks that are very repeatable,
00:29where you have to do the same thing over and over again.
00:32So therefore, they're used a lot in manufacturing, things like manufacturing cars,
00:35also because that kind of manufacturing has very heavy objects that may be dangerous for humans to handle or difficult.
00:41But now we're seeing them move into a bit less repeatable and more dynamic environments.
00:46So things like agriculture is a situation where you have a lot of structure,
00:51like a strawberry field has a very clear structure, but things are also a little bit different.
00:55So one strawberry is never the same as the other one.
00:57You have to always pick them in a little bit different ways.
01:00So a situation like that is much harder for a robot to handle.
01:06One thing that's especially been gaining a lot of progress in the last years
01:09are these humanoid robots that can help people at home.
01:12They have a sort of body, almost like a human, and are physically able to do any task that a human can do.
01:17But it's sort of their intelligence that's not quite where it needs to be for them to re-face a human worker for a given task.
01:25So I think in 2030, we'll see some of the earliest adopters have these kind of robots in their home to help them with data tasks.
01:31But they'll maybe be a bit too expensive, and they'll maybe break a bit too often for the average user to have them at home.
01:38GPT is trained by giving it lots of examples of text on the internet, and then it learns to predict what comes next in that text.
01:48But then a robot doesn't just need language, it also needs vision, sensing, and acting.
01:53And so you can supplement this language understanding with what's called a vision model.
01:59A robot can use the same kind of model to understand what goes on around it.
02:03But what's very special for robots is that they also have actions, so you can also train up what's called a vision-language action model,
02:10where, based on examples, it can learn how do my actions influence the world around me.
02:19Most of our work lives will probably change to some degree because we can rely more on advanced robots and AI systems to help us in our daily tasks.
02:27Some jumps will probably disappear, and it's quite important for countries to also have support for those whose jump doesn't need to be done anymore,
02:35or who can have a different kind of role in their job, maybe more assisted by robots and AI systems.
02:45It's possible to lose control of an AI system because it has found a solution that we can't really fully understand.
02:50So we have to be careful, and I think it's important to invest in research on AI safety.
02:55Like all other technology, it won't really be safe and responsible unless the user of it is safe and responsible.
03:01So one example is this European AI Act that came out a year or two ago, where they made some very clear rules for what we can use AI for,
03:09and depending on the task we use it for, what sort of preconditions we have to take, what we have to be careful about.
03:16So to make these sort of national and multinational agreements is a good way to make robot research and production responsible.
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