This book offers an interdisciplinary overview of autonomy in artificial intelligence and robotics, positioning it as the central concept in the contemporary debate on AI’s societal integration. The term itself is dangerously ambiguous: its meaning shifts dramatically when applied to a machine versus a human. While there is consensus on machine agency (the capacity to act), attributing autonomy in the rich, normative sense we attribute it to humans is a far more controversial and complex assertion.
This volume moves beyond isolated systems to consider hybrid human-machine autonomy, a space where AI’s capabilities intersect with human agency. Autonomy is therefore explored not just as a technical attribute, but as a relational concept that redefines a user’s capacity for self-governance in contexts of shared decision-making, assistive technology, and human augmentation. This central tension requires a broader approach to governance. The book argues that effective “regulation” is not merely law, but a wider domain for reflection, and that technology itself is a powerful regulatory force that must be shaped by a nuanced understanding of ethics, agency, values, and law.
This book confronts this challenge through a comprehensive, four-part structure. It begins with the Ethical Dimension, examining foundational questions and the profound social and educational implications of AI. It then moves to the Agential Dimension, focusing on embodied AI, robotics, and assistive healthcare. The third section, the Axiological Dimension, interrogates the popular concept of “value alignment,” moving beyond its common technical framing to advance new approaches for embedding values in hybrid systems. Finally, the Regulatory Dimension provides a practical analysis of governance, legal frameworks like the EU AI Act, and complex applications from finance to autonomous weapons.
This book will be of interest to researchers in AI, robotics, philosophy, law, and education, especially those in interdisciplinary settings. It is also essential reading for policymakers and private-sector professionals seeking to design and govern systems where the coordination of human and artificial agents is paramount.
Chapter "Repurposing Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems for disarmament" is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via Springerlink.
Daniel López-Castro is a researcher at the Instituto de Filosofía (IFS) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He is a doctoral candidate at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED).
His research focuses on the ethical, epistemological, and socio-political implications of digitalization, with interdisciplinary research experience in specific areas such as interactive robotics, brain-computer interfaces, and value alignment in artificial intelligence. He has worked for the projects Value-Awareness Engineering (VAE), Inclusive Robotics for a Better Society (INBOTS) and Bidirectional Hyper-Connected Neural Networks (EXTEND).
He has published his work in relevant journals both internationally (AI & Society, Nature Machine Intelligence, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine) and nationally (Arbor, Revista de Bioética y Derecho, Artefactos). He also directed an informative documentary on interactive robotics, artificial intelligence, and human-machine interaction, available on YouTube.
Manuel Cebral-Loureda is a full-time assistant professor and researcher at Tecnologico de Monterrey (Mexico). He holds a PhD in Philosophy of Technology (University of Santiago de Compostela) as well as a Msc Degree in Statistical Learning and Data Mining (UNED). He is the Coordinator of the Research Group of Digital Methods and Cultural Analytics of the Research Dean's Office of the Faculty of Humanities and Education. He belongs to the Level II National System of Researchers (SNII) of Mexico, as well as to the international research network in neuroengineering Building Reliable Advances and Innovations in Neurotechnology (BRAIN).
His main areas of research are the digital humanities, the creative use of code and technology in art and education, and the convergence of human and technology, including experimental design that involves EEG, human-computer interaction, and affective/cognitive sciences. He has published more than 20 research products in the last five years, in journals such as Scientific reports (Nature); Methods in Psychology; Machine Learning-Driven Digital Technologies for Educational Innovation; Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine; or Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. He is the coordinator of the compilation book What AI Can Do, Strengths and Limitations of Artificial Intelligence (2023).
Pablo Jiménez-Schlegl is Associate Researcher of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) at the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (CSIC-UPC), where he currently holds the Department Head position (since 2014). He studied Industrial Engineering at UPC and obtained his PhD at the Advanced Automation and Robotics program at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).
Along his professional career, his research has included the following topics: collision detection for robot motion planning, heuristic search, learning from demonstration, and manipulation of deformable objects. Lately he is also focusing his interest in robot ethics. All these topics have been developed in regional, national, and European projects, with the corresponding publications and dissemination.
Outreach activities for specialists and for the general public include conferences, from high school level to health professionals, teachers, or space technology students. He has coauthored a teaching book on Robotics and AI for students of Laws in the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and a recent dissemination book on Robotics, emphasizing ethics (2025, Barcelona).
