The AAAI 2014 Fall Symposium Series was held Thursday through Saturday, November 13–15, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia adjacent to Washington, DC. The titles of the seven symposia were Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction, Energy Market Prediction, Expanding the Boundaries of Health Informatics Using AI, Knowledge, Skill, and Behavior Transfer in Autonomous Robots, Modeling Changing Perspectives: Reconceptualizing Sensorimotor Experiences, Natural Language Access to Big Data, and The Nature of Humans and Machines: A Multidisciplinary Discourse. The highlights of each symposium are presented in this report.

The program also included six keynote presentations, a funding panel, a community panel, and multiple breakout sessions. The keynote presentations, given by speakers that have been working on AI for HRI for many years, focused on the larger intellectual picture of this subfield. Each speaker was asked to address, from his or her personal perspective, why HRI is an AI problem and how AI research can bring us closer to the reality of humans interacting with robots on everyday tasks. Speakers included Rodney Brooks (Rethink Robotics), Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University), Michael Goodrich (Brigham Young University), Benjamin Kuipers (University of Michigan), Maja Mataric (University of Southern California), and Brian Scassellati (Yale University).

Research in neurally-based machine (i.e. computational) systems is expanding. “Reverse-engineered” models of brain-like structures are viable candidates for developing increasing complexification (via generatively encoded “intelligence”) that could instantiate some form of consciousness – albeit not identical to human consciousness. This essay posits how such trajectories could lead to the iterative development of “machine sentience” and addresses issues of what “machine consciousness” might mean for: 1) the ways that humans regard such machine entities as “beings” and/or “persons”, and 2) philosophical, ethical and socio-legal positions which might need to be adapted to guide and govern human treatment of, and interactions with such entities. Herein, I argue that neuroethics contributes crucial insights and viable tools to any meaningful approach to this topic (in synergy with extant discourse in “robo-ethics”). As the fields of neuro- and cognitive science, and computational engineering become increasingly convergent, so too must the philosophical and ethical approaches that can – and should – be employed to direct what convergent science may create. The speed and breadth of such technological development are such that neuroethical address and engagement of these issues and questions must be equivalently paced and iterative, so as to retain preparatory value.