Adults' robot literacy: Results from a Finnish survey

This article presents and discusses the results of a national survey on adults’ media and robot literacy in Finland with a focus on robot literacy. The study addresses three pressing global challenges: population aging, increasing robotization, and a research gap concerning the skills and competencies needed for interacting with robots. The survey operationalized the authors’ robot literacy framework, which focuses on physical robots and defines robot literacy across seven skill dimensions: (1) Awareness of robots; (2) Interaction with robots; (3) Understanding and evaluating the information robots provide; (4) Understanding the data security and privacy of robots; (5) Programming of robots; (6) Ethical reflection; and (7) Providing and receiving social support on robotics-related questions. The survey addressed the following research questions: What is the scope of adults’ robot literacy? How are gender, age, education, household composition, and use of the Internet connected to adults’ robot literacy?
The study marks the first attempt to map robot literacy across a national population. It shows that despite recent progress in AI and future forecasts of advances in the development of social and humanoid robots, awareness of robots is still limited among Finland’s adult population and does not originate mainly in firsthand experiences with robots. Furthermore, the respondents exhibited uncertainty in their ethical reflection, in knowledge about interaction with robots, and in their understanding and evaluation of the information provided by robots. They also reported being entirely unprepared—or possessing low or very low skills—in providing social support related to robotics. For the field of computing education, the study offers new insights into the relatively limited robot literacy of adults, particularly older adults. A key practical implication is that adult educators—computing educators included—as well as researchers, instructional designers, the media, robotic service providers, robot developers, and other stakeholders must actively promote robot literacy among the adult population.