Explainable Autonomous Robots: A Survey and Perspective

It is commonly claimed that AI will replace most manual labor in the future; however, is this really the case? AI technologies do have higher image recognition accuracy compared to humans in some limited contexts, and have consistently outperformed humans in classical games such as Go and chess. Nonetheless, we believe that even advanced future developments based on current technology will not lead to robots replacing humans. AI systems' fundamental lack of ability to communicate naturally and effectively with humans is among the most significant reasons that they cannot replace human labor. Here, one may believe that such communication could be achieved via the development of natural language processing (NLP) technology [4]; however, NLP technologies are systems for estimating the content of human statements and their meanings; they do not constitute communication. That is, humans do not feel that robots using such systems truly understand and respond to them appropriately. Therefore, if effective communication is not achieved, robots will continue to function only as tools to assist humans. Advancements improving the accuracy or effectiveness of various specific tasks do not indicate that robots are equivalent to human beings. Under this scenario, how can we enable robots to communicate with humans?