Developing artificial minds: Joint attention and robotics

Humans possess a distinctive suite of social skills that partly explains the uniquely complex and cumulative nature of the societies and cultures we live within. These skills include the capacity for collaborative plans, joint attention and joint action: in short, the capacity to share a form of life together. Dr Mike Wilby, ARU, discuss how these skills develop in human infants and children, and argue that this gives us an insight into how we might be able to develop ‘benign AI’ that would be intelligent, collaborative, integrated and benevolent.