The University will lead the Center for Human and Robot Co-Adaptation, a U.S. National Science Foundation project, to study how humans and robots can adapt and work with each other safely. The center will receive $6 million annually for five years, then will be eligible to apply for five additional years of funding, according to an Aug. 26 NSF news release.
The center is one of three new NSF Science and Technology Centers. The others, led by Northwestern University and Michigan State University, will focus on researching airplane turbulence and genome editing, respectively. The NSF STC program was established in 1987 to drive research in emerging fields.
The center will continue the work of Good Systems, a team of UT researchers working on building ethical artificial intelligence and educating on proper AI use.
Peter Stone, head of the UT School of Computing and a founding member of the Good Systems executive team, said the objective of the project is to create an understanding of the impact of robots and humans interacting for long periods of time. This information will help to design robots that can adapt with humans and have their best interests in mind.
Stone said robots have not yet reached a breakthrough “ChatGPT moment,” referring to the months after ChatGPT’s release when people started changing their behaviors and building habits based around the new technology.
“The goal of this center is to, before it’s too late, understand how … (robots) will affect people’s behavior rather than studying it after the fact.”
Stone said AI, specifically large language models, has had adverse effects, citing concerns that students are no longer learning because they are using generative AI to do schoolwork. He said the introduction of robots raises similar concerns, since they could be “large language models on wheels,” and have the potential to take on physical tasks.
The center includes 39 researchers from six different universities including Yale, MIT, Indiana University Bloomington, Tufts University and the University of Utah. The project also has industry partners such as Amazon and NVIDIA.
“It’s up to us to create the future, and it’s up to us as researchers and as developers and as a society to make the future positive,” Stone said. “The technology doesn’t just advance on its own. It’s all a series of decisions made by people, and the point of the project is to make sure we understand the impacts of those decisions.”