To appear in: Robophilosophy—Philosophy of, for and by Social Robotics, ed. by J. Seibt, R. Hakli, and M. Nørskov, MIT Press 2026 1 Chapter 1 What Is Robophilosophy? Johanna Seibt and Raul Hakli 1. Introduction Never in its history has philosophy been as relevant as it is today. The machines we are creating now, machines in our image and partly already far beyond our capabilities, shake philosophy awake from its latest scholastic slumbers. Any concerns about the fast and continuous improvement of artificial intelligence (AI) amplify in magnitude and dimensions once they enter the physical and symbolic space of human social actions. From ethics to ontology, from philosophy of mind to epistemology, from metaphysics to political philosophy, anthropology, and aesthetics —with the rise of ‘social robotics’ the entire enterprise of philosophy is confronted with new territory, tools, and transfigurations, but most of all with new tasks. The “robot revolution,” the creation of intelligent embodied artificial ‘social’ agents, presents an unprecedented challenge to human self-understanding, and to the depth structure of our socio-cultural realities. Robophilosophy is the comprehensive philosophical response to this unique challenge. Recently AI researchers called for a six-months moratorium on the development of large-scale AI systems, since “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity [since tech labs] develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.” 1 In view of this situation it has become much less plausible to claim that AI and robotics, the fifth technological revolution that will lead (large sections of) humanity from the information age to the “automation age” (McKinsey Global Institute, n.d.), is merely one more transformation among others. Given that now even the tech community wonders whether we “should develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us” (ibid), we can no longer downplay the prospect of robots in society as just another disruption of socio-cultural and socio-economic practices. Embodied social AI-systems will amount to a change in the most basic parameters of a human life, in the conditio humana. As the capacities of AI-systems are steadily increasing, and thereby also the capacities of their robotic implementations, it is increasingly less plausible to continue to champion the deflationary response: that we will adapt to the automation age as we have adapted to past profound technological changes , from agriculture to writing, print, engines, electricity, the internet. This type of inductive reasoning—problematic anyway for complex socio-cultural systems—cannot be used for the case of social robotics. Even if one might agree to the premise that we so far have been able to adapt to, and benefitted from, increasingly more sophisticated technological tools, such past evidence