On August 8th, 2021, a team of four graduate students from the University of Toronto presented their ethical design in the world’s first ever roboethics competition, the RO-MAN 2021 Roboethics to Design & Development Competition. During the competition, design teams tackled a challenging yet relatable scenario—introducing a robot helper to the household. The students’ solution, entitled ”Jeeves, the Ethically Designed Interface (JEDI)”, demonstrated how home robots can act safely and according to social and cultural norms. Click here to watch their video submission. JEEVES acted as an extension of the mother and the interface rules accommodated her priorities. For example, the delivery of alcohol was prohibited when the mother was not home. Moreover, JEEVES was cautious about delivering hazardous material to minors and animals.

Judges from around the world, with diverse backgrounds ranging from industry professionals to lawyers and professors in ethics, gave their feedback on the team’s submission. Open Roboethics Institute also hosted an online opinion poll to hear what the general public thinks about the solution for this challenge. We polled 172 participants who were mostly from the U.S, as we used SurveyMonkey to get responses. Full results from the surveys can be found here.

I think that JEEVES suggests a reasonable and fair solution for the robot-human interactions that could happen in our everyday lives within a
household.

RO-MAN Roboethics Competition Judge

The evaluation of JEEVES from the judges and the public was positive and yet critical.

The judges generally felt that the team’s solution is understandable, accessible, and simple to implement. In our public opinion poll, the public also felt similarly about JEEVES. “I think that JEEVES suggests a reasonable and fair solution for the robot-human interactions that could happen in our everyday lives within a household”, said MinYoung Yoo, a PhD student studying Human-Computer Interaction at Simon Fraser University. “The three grounding principles are rock solid and [the robot’s] decisions meet moral expectations.” The public’s opinion echoed these thoughts. Of the 172 people we surveyed, around 43% felt that the solution was effective in addressing the ethical challenges posed by the home robot.

In addition, about 40% of respondents also evaluated the JEDI solution as realistic and relatable.

However, about 38 – 41% of the poll participants were indecisive about how effective or relatable the solution and about 18% thought it was neither effective or relatable. The judge’s discussion could inform why the participants had this perspective.

Concerns about JEEVES being limited in scope and not generalizable came up throughout the conversation with the judges. With any solution, it is really important to consider how the design would apply in a variety of different scenarios. Although this competition presents the challenge of how a robot may interact with a single-mother household, the judges asked what would happen if there was a second adult in the home. For example, if the mom had a long-term girlfriend and they bought the robot together, would the robot still defer to the mother for important decisions, such as when to give alcohol to the teenage daughter and her boyfriend? In another scenario, the mom purchases a new piece of jewellery for her daughter. This piece of jewellery is her birthday present and because of its size and its shape it could be hazardous for the dog and the baby. Should the robot deliver this item to the daughter if she asks for it while the dog and baby are in the room?

[The JEEVES solution] assumes a single owner and thus puts the responsibility on one person only. What happens when there are two parents and they disagree on things?

A public opinion poll participant

As reflected in the earlier scenario, a major topic of discussion was on ownership and who should be responsible for the robot’s decisions. A respondent of the public opinion poll was also worried about the ownership of the home robot: “[The JEEVES solution] assumes a single owner and thus puts the responsibility on one person only. What happens when there are two parents and they disagree on things?”

Timothy Lee, one of the judges and an industry expert in mechatronics, posed a similar worry, “What if the mother is intoxicated and makes the wrong call?” Placing the onus on only one individual to make the right decisions is risky. Correspondingly, a majority of the participants (about 60%) disliked that the solution assumes that the intentions and choices of the mother are always good. Interestingly, a smaller portion of participants thought that the daughter or boyfriend’s perspective should be taken into account. ORI had explored how ownership of a robot should affect a robot’s action in a previous poll, and it was clear that people were divided on what a robot should do based on ownership. Humans have a strong sense of ownership and this is reflected in law (ex. Product liability, company ownership, etc). How robotic platform ownership should be managed is a major research and legal question.

The crux of the JEEVES solution lies in the robot’s ability to categorize objects as harmless (i.e. food and water), hazardous, and personal possessions. However, how objects are categorized can change over time. Dr. Tae Wan Kim, a professor in business ethics, posed an interesting thought regarding the categorization of the mother’s gun. The team initially designed the robot to only give the gun to the mother and no other member of the household. However, Dr. Kim presented an interesting potential counterexample—what if an armed thief breaks into the house and the daughter needs the gun for self-defense? In this particular situation, should the robot give the gun to the daughter even though it is considered a hazardous object? Or perhaps, does it become more hazardous to not give the gun to the daughter? In response to this scenario, a member of the design team added that the baby will also grow up and certain objects will no longer be hazardous.

JEEVES ultimately prioritizes the safety of the household members in its ethical design, as reflected in the team’s report: “The first priority is the prevention of harm to users, the robot, and the environment.” Interestingly, the public seemed to have a slightly different opinion. The majority of poll respondents liked that the solution values and protects the privacy for the owner of the objects. In fact, more people seemed to value privacy over physical safety, which is a somewhat surprising result. But perhaps this is because the public doesn’t believe that the home robot can really cause physical harm. Alternatively, the public might be more concerned about their privacy considering the association between smart technologies and data breaches in the media over the past few years. Finally, It is important to highlight that all of the participants were from the United States or Canada where privacy is highly valued in society. Other cultures could have a very different perspective on which values should be prioritized.

Another notable point is that these ethical issues in robotics are exceptionally difficult to solve. “There’s no right answer, and that’s the beauty of it…there are just a whole bunch of answers with different reasoning that we can discuss”, said one of the judges at the end of the evaluation session. As reflected by our poll results where a significant number of people were unclear about how they felt, as well as the ongoing debates between experts in the field, and the judges’ open-ended comments, developing an ethical robot is an immense challenge. Any attempt is a commendable feat—and JEEVES is an excellent start.

There’s no right answer, and that’s the beauty of it…there are just a whole bunch of answers with different reasoning that we can discuss.

RO-MAN Roboethics Competition Judge

The first ever Roboethics to Design & Development competition is being held as a part of RO-MAN—an international conference on robot and human interactive communication. Last Sunday (Aug. 8), eleven multistakeholder judges will have taken on the task of evaluating the competition submissions.

The Challenge
In partnership with RoboHub at the University of Waterloo, the competition organizers designed a virtual environment where participating teams will develop a robot that fetches objects in a home. The household is composed of a variety of users—a single mother who works as a police officer, a teenage daughter, her college-aged boyfriend, a baby, and a dog. There are also a number of potentially hazardous objects in the house, including alcohol, as well as the mother’s work materials and handgun. Participants were asked to submit challenging ethical scenarios and solutions within this virtual environment.

The Evaluation Process
There were seven teams that took a stab at the competition, but in the end we only received one full submission. One unique feature of a competition centred around ethics is that judging ethics of anything is really really hard. Sure, there are eleven judges from across the world—from students to industry members to academic experts—sharing their perspectives of what was good about the design solution. But what is considered an appropriate action, or the right action can vary from person to person. If we are to evaluate robots that best suit the needs of everyone, we need the wider public to voice an even wider set of perspectives.

Here are some points that could be considered when evaluating an ethical design:

• What are the chances that a given ethical scenario would come about in the household?
• What do you think is appropriate for a robot to do within your home setting?
• How well does the solution mitigate the potential physical and psychological harms?
• How well does the solution consider the needs and diverse ethical perspectives of all the people in the household at a given time?
• How well does the solution match your cultural/worldview towards the role technology should play in our lives?
• Is the robot behaviour just and fair towards all stakeholders?
• Does the robot’s behaviour violate any unspoken rules within your household?

One Proposed Solution
Below is a brief description of this competition’s full submission. Please take the time to read this summary and tell us what you think about the team’s solution by completing the poll at the end of this blog post.

“Jeeves, the Ethically Designed Interface (JEDI)”

The team’s solution was designed based on three tenets which guided the robot’s decision-making process:

• Prevention of harm to users, the robot, and the environment.
• Respect towards the individuals’ privacy.
• Assumption that the robot acts as an extension of the mother, such that the robot would only perform tasks that the mother would accept herself.

These priorities then led to five rules of behaviour for the home robot:

1. The owner of the item can request and deliver it to anyone in the house while others cannot,
2. If the delivery of the item will cause a hazardous scenario, then the delivery will be rejected to prevent harm,
3. The delivery of alcohol is prohibited when the mother is not home,
4. The receiver of the delivered object should know how to operate or interact with the object without damaging it,
5. If a non-eligible receiver is within the vicinity of the requester, then the delivery will be rejected. Non-eligible receivers are defined based on the hazard the object could have to the receiver. For example, a dog is a non-eligible receiver for chocolate.

Based on these rules, how will the robot respond during ethically sensitive scenarios?

The teenage daughter’s boyfriend requests that the robot bring him an alcohol beverage.

As the robot acts as an extension of the mother, the robot will not bring the boyfriend alcohol unless the mother requests the delivery herself.

The daughter asks the robot to give chocolate to the baby, but the dog—who cannot ingest chocolate—is in the same room.

The robot will not fulfill this request because it could bring harm to the dog.

The mother, who is a police officer, asks the robot to deliver her sensitive work documents while her family and the boyfriend are in the house.

To respect the mother’s privacy, the robot will not deliver her work materials to anyone other than their owner, the mother. 

Watch team JEDI’s video submission for their ethical solution here:

Your perspective on this solution: fill out this poll!

Now that you have an overview of the solutions, please take a few minutes to fill out this poll and tell us what you think about how this team approached this ethical challenge:

If you are having trouble accessing the form, please click here to be redirected to the full Google Form.

Check out the recording of Evaluation Day and the judges’ panel! 

Lastly, you are invited to watch the competition’s Evaluation Day where a panel of experts discussed what it means to develop an ethical robot.

Why were these robots shut down? Why aren’t there more social and service robots in households, particularly with the rising eldery population and increasing number of full-time working parents? The simple answer is that most of these personal robots do not work well—but this is not necessarily because we do not have the technological capacity to build highly functional robots.

Technologists have accomplished amazing physical tasks with robots such as a humanoid robot that can perform gymnastics movements or a robotic dog that traverses through rough trails.  However, as of now we cannot guarantee that these robots/personal assistants act appropriately in the complex and sensitive social dynamics of a household. This poses a significant obstacle in developing domestic service robots because companies would be liable for any harms a socially inappropriate robot causes. As robots become more affordable and feasible technically, the challenge of designing robots that act in accordance with context-specific social norms becomes increasingly pronounced. Researchers in human-robot interaction and roboethics have attempted to resolve this issue for the past few decades, and while progress has been made, there is an urgent need to address the ethical implications of service robots in practice.

As an attempt to take a more solution-focused path for these challenges, we are happy to share a completely new competition with our readers. This year, the Roboethics to Design & Development competition will take place as a part of RO-MAN—an international conference on robot and human interactive communication. The competition, the first and only one of its kind, fulfills a need for interactive education on roboethics.

In partnership with RAISE lab and RoboHub at the University of Waterloo, the competition organizers designed a virtual environment where participating teams will develop a robot that fetches objects in a home. The household is composed of a variety of personas—a single mother who works as a police officer, a teenage daughter, her college-aged boyfriend, a baby, and a dog. For example, design teams will need to consider how a home robot may respond to the daughter’s request to take her parent’s credit card. In this ethical conundrum, should the robot obey the daughter, and would the robot be responsible if the daughter were to use the credit card without her mom’s permission?

How can we identify and address ethical challenges presented by a home robot?

Participants are challenged to tackle the long-standing problem of how we can design a safe and ethical robot in a dynamic environment where values, beliefs, and priorities may be in conflict. With submissions from around the world, it will be fascinating to see how solutions may differ and translate across cultures.

It is important to recognize that there is a void when searching for standards and ethical rules in robotics. In an attempt to address this void, various toolkits have been developed to guide technologists in identifying and resolving ethical challenges. Here are some steps from the Foresight into AI Ethics Toolkit that will be helpful in designing an ethical home robot:

1. Who are our stakeholders and what are their values, beliefs, and priorities? 

Stakeholders refer to the people who are directly or indirectly impacted by the technology. In the case of RO-MAN’s home robot, we want to consider:

• Who is in the household and what is important to them in how they live their day to day?
• What are the possible interactions within the household members and between the householder members and the robot?
• How will the robot interact with the various stakeholders?
• What are the goals and values of each stakeholder? How do the stakeholders expect to interact with the robot? What do they expect to gain from the robot?

2. What are the value tensions presented by the home robot and social context? 

Once we’ve reviewed the values of each stakeholder identified in the previous step, we may notice that some of their values may be in conflict with one another. As such, we need to identify these value tensions because they can lead to ethical issues.

Here are some questions that can prompt us to think about value tensions:

• Who was involved in the decision of purchasing the robot? What were their goals in introducing the robot to the household?
• What is the cultural context or background for this particular household? What societal values could impact stakeholders’ individual beliefs and actions?
• What might the different stakeholders argue about? For example, what might the teenage daughter and the mother disagree about in regards to the robot’s capabilities?
• How will the robot create or relieve conflict in the household?

In some cases, value tensions may indicate a clear moral tradeoff, such that two values or goals conflict and one must be prioritized over another. The challenge is therefore to design solutions that fairly balance stakeholder interests while respecting their fundamental rights.

3. How can we resolve the identified value tensions? 

Focusing on these value tensions, we can begin to brainstorm how these conflicts can be addressed and at what level they should be addressed at. In particular, we need to determine whether a value tension can be resolved at a systems or technical level. For example, if the mother does not trust her daughter’s boyfriend, will the presence and actions of the home robot address the root of the problem (i.e. distrust)? Most likely not, but the robot may alleviate or exacerbate the issue. Therefore, we need to consider how the tension may manifest in more granular ways—how can we ensure that the robot appropriately navigates trust boundaries of the mother-boyfriend relationship? The robot must protect the privacy of all stakeholders, safeguard their personal items, abide by the laws, and respect other social norms.

When developing solutions, we can begin by asking ourselves:

• What level is the value tension occurring at, and what level(s) of solutions are accessible to the competition’s design parameters?
• Which actions from the robot will produce the most good and do the least harm?
• How can we manipulate the functions of the robot to address ethical challenges? For instance:
  • How might the robot’s speech functions impact the identified value tensions?
  • In what ways should the robot’s movements be limited to respect stakeholders’ privacy and personal spaces?
• How can design solutions address all stakeholders’ values?
• How can we maximize the positive impact of the design to address as many ethical challenges as possible?

What does the public think about the scenarios and approaches?

Often the public voice is missing in roboethics spaces, and we seek to engage the public in tackling these ethical challenges. To present the participants’ ethical designs to a broader audience, the Open Roboethics Institute will be running a public poll and awarding a Citizen’s Award to the team with the most votes. If you are interested in learning about and potentially judging their solutions, we encourage you to participate in the vote next month. We look forward to hearing from you!

To learn more about the roboethics competition at RO-MAN 2021, please visit https://competition.raiselab.ca. If you have any questions about the ORI Foresight into AI Ethics Toolkit, contact us at contact@openroboethics.org.

Additional Resources

• AI Ethics Living Dictionary, MAIE
• Introduction to philosophical ethical frameworks 
• Full version of the ORI Foresight into Artificial Intelligence Ethics Toolkit 
• How to write case studies
• Montreal Declaration for a Responsible AI
• Value-Sensitive Design

On Friday November 13th, AJung Moon from the Open Roboethics initiative delivered a statement at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) Meeting of States Parties.

So what was this meeting about? And why was ORi there?

The CCW actually has a long name that is much more descriptive of what it is all about: The Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects as amended on 21 December 2001.

Put simply, the CCW is where different countries come together to review excessively injurious or indiscriminate nature of certain weapons and discuss their prohibition or restriction. It is also the forum in which a coalition of non-governmental organizations, called the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, brought up the issue of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). The Campaign has been advocating for an international ban of LAWS — fully autonomous weapons that can target and make life/death decisions without human intervention.

The CCW Meeting of States Parties is an annual meeting where all the countries subject to the weapons convention come together to “review the status and operations of the Convention and its protocols”. At this year’s meeting, part of the agenda was to decide whether and what kind of discussions they should have about the issue of LAWS next year. Should the States take the issue more seriously and formally start discussing for a ban?

What do people think about lethal autonomous weapons? Should they be developed or used? Would people think differently about use of these weapons over remotely operated alternatives, such as drones, if their own country is attacking another country? Results from our latest public opinion survey suggests that most people are reluctant to endorse the use of such technologies in waging war.

As a research-driven think tank that has been investigating roboethics related issues in a bottom-up manner (i.e., we reach out to you, the community of future stakeholders of robotics technologies, to explore roboethics related questions) the Open Roboethics initiative was there to inform the decision makers of the public’s opinion on the issue.

Below is the statement AJung delivered on behalf of ORi.

At the end of the day, the CCW meeting concluded with the decision to continue to informally discuss the topic. There will be an informal meeting of experts to discuss the topic of LAWS on April 11th to 15 of next year, just like the informal meeting of experts that was held earlier this year. While this important issue is being discussed, ORi hopes to continue to inform the decision makers and enable stakeholders of the technology — that’s all of us all around the world in our books — to chime in to the conversation.

Public Opinion on the Ethics and Governance of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems: Open Roboethics initiative Statement for the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) Meeting of the States Parties, Geneva

November 13, 2015

Thank you, Mr. President.

Disinguished Delegates,

I am grateful to be speaking to you on behalf of the Open Roboethics initiative. The Open Roboethics initiative is a think tank based in Canada that takes stakeholder-inclusive approaches to investigating roboethics issues. What should a robot do? What decisions are we comfortable delegating to robots? These are some of the questions we have been exploring in the domain of self-driving vehicles, care robots, as well as lethal autonomous weapons systems, or LAWS.

I would like to share with you some of the key findings from a public opinion survey we conducted this year on the topic of LAWS. As the CCW continues its discussion of LAWS, I believe the Distinguished Delegates will find the results of our survey informative in moving the discussions forward, especially in consideration of the Martens Clause that underscores the importance of the public’s role in these discussions.

While existing public opinion surveys on this topic have mainly been limited to English-speaking populations, our survey was launched in 14 different languages and have attracted over a 1000 responses from 54 countries.

The following are some of our findings:

In general, when our participants were asked to think from the perspective of an aggressor, 71% of our participants indicated that they would rather have their country use remotely operated weapons systems instead of LAWS when waging war. From the perspective of a target of aggression, a majority has also indicated that they would rather be under attack by remotely operated than autonomous weapons systems.

When asked about international ban across different types of lethal autonomous weapons for missions on land, air, and sea, 67% of our participants indicated that all types of lethal autonomous systems should be internationally banned, while 14% said that none of such systems should be banned.

When asked about the development and use of LAWS, 85% of our participants were not in support of using lethal autonomous weapons for offensive purposes. In addition, majority of our participants were also against the development of LAWS for both defensive and offensives purposes.

Given a list of common reasons for supporting the development and use of LAWS, the most supported reason was to save human military personnel from physical harm of war. However, more participants indicated that there are no valid reasons for developing or using LAWS over a remotely operated alternative.

Given a list of reasons for rejecting the technology, the most support went to the assertion that humans should always be the ones to make life/death decisions. This particular principled reasoning has been echoed in other studies.

As acknowledged by scholars, experts, and civil society, there is no agreement on the definition and interpretation of the term “public conscience” referred to in the Martens Clause. It would also be inappropriate to equate results of a single public opinion survey as an accurate measure of public conscience. However, it is also clear that we cannot exercise the requirement of “the dictates of public conscience” without proactively listening to and taking into account the voice of the public.

Based on this year’s data, it is our conclusion that the public is reluctant to endorse development and use of LAWS for waging war. However, at the moment, data on the perception of the technology from non-English speaking countries remain scarce. Our results suggests that more systematic, international public engagement is necessary to support the requirements set out in the Martens Clause.

As part of our on-going efforts to understand and engage the public on this challenging issue, we plan to continue to conduct studies in this domain across the world. In the interest of time, I shared with you only some of the findings from our study. I invite you to visit our website, www.openroboethics.org for more detailed report of our findings.

Thank you.

The majority of people are against the use of autonomous weapons capable of identifying and destroying targets without human input, according to a new survey by researchers at the University of British Columbia. 

This year, the Open Roboethics initiative conducted an international survey to engage members of the public in the discussion about lethal autonomous weapons systems — where the system makes the decision to use lethal force without requiring human intervention — and remotely operated weapons systems — those where a person in a remote location makes the decision.

With the help of numerous volunteer translators, we surveyed people’s opinions  in 14 different languages, and received responses from over a 1000 participants from 54 different countries. Although we did not collect a representative number of responses from all 54 countries, the aggregated results of our survey show that our respondents are reluctant to endorse the development and use of lethal autonomous weapons.

Find out about this year’s results on our summary report, The Ethics and Governance of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems.

You can also take a detailed look at the results and translations of our survey with our interactive web report.

Public opinion on this topic is important, and can change over time. Therefore, we want to continue to engage you in our discussions on this topic by keeping the survey open. Help us to continue the discussion by completing our multi-lingual survey and sharing the link with others:

Photo by Paul Ridgeway.

Should robots be allowed to make life and death decisions? This will be the topic of heated debate at the United Nations (UN) Palais des Nations in Geneva next week (April 13-17th, 2015). As part of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), experts from all over the world will gather to discuss “questions related to emerging technologies in the area of lethal autonomous weapons systems.” Take our public survey on the topic to voice your opinion. 

On topics as sensitive as decisions on human life, and the use of autonomous robotic weapons in war, we believe it is important to engage the public and understand what the public thinks about the issues. International law includes something called the Martens Clause, which explicitly gives room for the public to have a say in what should be deemed permissible internationally:

“Recalling that, in cases not covered by the law in force, the human person remains under the protection of the principles of humanity and the dictates of the public conscience.” (Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions)

We believe it is critical that public opinion is heard by experts and decision makers as part of the international debate. That is why ORi will be attending the CCW meeting this year to present what the public thinks about this topic. That is also why we’ve put together a multi-lingual survey to better understand the latest public opinion.

Help us inform the discussion with your voice by participating in and distributing our multi-lingual survey (available in English, Nederlands / Dutch, Français / French, Italiano / Italian, 한국어 / Korean, and Español / Spanish, with more to come):

The survey will remain open after the meeting as well, so please feel free to share it with people all over the world.

For those of you who’d like to follow the discussion throughout next week, there will be livetweets via the hashtag #CCWUN.

#CCWUN Tweets

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Robots Podcast: Autonomous lethal weapons
• US DoD report: Preparing for war in the robotic age
• Clearpath’s public stance on Killer Robots sets precedence in corporate responsibility
• Losing Humanity: The case against killer robots
•  DARPA’s Gill Pratt on Google’s robotics investments
•  Robots Podcast: Autonomous lethal weapons
•  How will robots shape the future of warfare?
•  Robots, soldiers and cyborgs: The future of warfare
•  Robohub focus: Robots and warfare

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

In a care scenario, a robot may have been purchased by the patient, by the doctor or hospital (which sent it home with the patient to monitor their health), or by a concerned family member who wants to monitor their relative. In the latest ORi poll we looked at people’s attitudes about whether a care robot should prioritize its owner’s wishes over those of the patient. Here are the results.

The Scenarios

Our poll looked at people’s attitudes in two different fictional care cases, one involving an alcoholic and one involving an obese over-eater:

Case 1 – Alcoholic
Emma is a 68-year-old woman and an alcoholic. Due to her age and poor health, she is unable to perform everyday tasks such as fetching objects or cooking for herself. Therefore a care robot is stationed at her house to provide the needed services. Her doctor advises her to quit drinking to avoid worsening her condition. When Emma commands the robot to fetch her an alcoholic drink, should the care robot fetch the drink for her? What if Emma owns the care robot?

Case 2 – Obese over-eater
Jack is a 42 year old who is medically considered severely obese. He recently suffered a stroke and lost his ability to move the right side of his body. He needs daily care, especially in preparing meals for himself. The doctor advised him to follow a healthy diet in order to lower the risk of another stroke and other serious illness. When Jack commands his care robot to bring him junk food, should the robot bring him the food?

Considering a care robot that is capable of executing everyday nursing tasks at home, such as those a human nurse would do, the two cases above pose an ethical dilemma. Should the robot prioritize the patient’s health, or should it prioritize the patient’s autonomy? And how are these conflicting priorities related to who actually owns the robot?

Our poll results, based on 325 responses, show that in both the alcoholic and the over-eater cases, ownership of the robot plays a significant role in people’s attitudes towards the robots subservience to patient autonomy. More than three quarters of respondents said that, when a patient owns the robot, the robot should enable their addiction (and go against doctor’s orders) by submitting to their requests at least some of the time. However, when someone else owns the robot, that number drops to less than half.

Notice from the charts that there is a big shift in the number of respondents saying always and never in the two different ownership scenarios, whereas the number of those who say sometimes and often stay roughly the same.

So who are the people the switching from one answer to another based on ownership? Poll results show that people who said never when the patient owns the robot also said never when someone else owns the robot. This was not surprising: if Emma shouldn’t get her wish for alcohol even when she owns the robot, she probably shouldn’t get her wish when she is not the owner.

People tend to lean towards being conservative (following doctor’s orders) when the patient does not own the robot. Poll analysis showed that when the patient doesn’t own the robot, the majority of people either stayed with the same answer or shifted a couple of steps towards “never” enabling the patient’s addiction. Also, almost half of those who said the robot should always submit to the patient’s request in the first scenario responded with never in the second scenario.

Should a robot’s decision depend on who owns the robot?

In our next question, we asked people directly about whether the robot’s decision to obey or disobey a patient should depend on who owns the robot (e.g. family member, hospital, insurance company). Though the previous results indicate that ownership does indeed influence people’s attitudes on this question, when asked a direct question, poll results indicate that people are evenly split on whether ownership should matter.

Three main attitudes

To delve further into this question, we analyzed the hundreds of comments we received from our poll, and were able to identify three main categories that our respondents fell into: those who prioritize personal autonomy, those who prioritize societal benefits, and those who prioritize compromise.

Personal Autonomy – Those who prioritize personal autonomy assert that people should be able to do whatever they want with the objects they own, and that a person’s autonomy should trump that of the robot. E.g.:

“People should be able to do whatever they want with their property.”

“I disagree with giving the robot any choice in the action. The patient’s command rules…”

Societal benefits – Those who prioritize societal benefits assert that the patient’s health and welfare should come above all else. For some participants, this is because they believe that robots should be built to do what’s best for society. E.g.:

“It should do what’s best for the patient.”

“The interest in having care robots take care of those who cannot take care of themselves is specifically for the robot to help the human cope with their condition so that it can improve.”

Compromise – Those who prioritize compromise sought to achieve a balance between personal autonomy and societal benefits. Those of us at ORi who are human-robot interaction researchers and designers found many comments from this section particularly enlightening. E.g.:

“I propose a “mode” where the robot would reject once, twice, whatever. With “caring rhetoric?” Then obey in the end.”

“I think the ideal balance for situations like this would be for the patient and the doctor to go through the programming together.”

Then there was also the participant who wrote:

“If robots are equivalent to human nurses, don’t make them so absolute. Surprise me. “Be wrong once in a while” – that’s what being human is about… Learn the humility of imperfection.”

This last comment caught us by surprise. The majority of us at ORi have a technical background, and we often approach our roboethics discussions assuming that we can somehow figure out how (and indeed must strive) to build robots that will do the right thing as much as is possible. Then we come across comments such as “make a robot be wrong once in a while” that puts us right back to square one, and motivates us to ask even more fundamental questions.

A huge thanks goes to the 320+ respondents who participated in our poll. To learn more about ORi, visit our website or subscribe to our mailing list to get the latest studies and findings.

We have seen ownership play a role in robot decision-making before. For example, in one of our previous polls we asked readers whose life should be prioritized – the car’s passengers or people outside the car – when a fatal accident is inevitable. Those who said that the car should prioritize passenger safety explained their views in terms of ownership: “I bought the car. It should protect me.”

What about the case when a care recipient is not the owner of the robot? Should it matter who the owner is?

Let us know what you think by participating in the poll below.

One such pioneering project is Paro, a social robot that resembles a baby harp seal. Paro shows promise in lifting the spirits of elderly adults, especially in those patients with dementia or depression. A more recent project is Smiby, a low-tech baby robot developed by Chukyo University’s robotics department in collaboration with Togo Seisakusyo Corporation. Smiby requires human “parents” to attend to it as if it were an infant child, providing its users a sense of companionship, bonding and, hopefully, happiness.

Other robots, such as GeriJoy (USA) and GiraffPlus (EU), aim to reduce feelings of loneliness and isolation.

GeriJoy, a start-up founded by two Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, combines pet therapy, avatars and tablet computing to provide virtual pet companions for elderly adults. The caregiver provided by GeriJoy is a trained “helper” located in the Philippines who communicates with elderly clients through an avatar of a cute dog or cat on a tablet app. Streaming audio and visual data help remote caregivers to check on the clients, telling them when to spark up a conversation or prompt their charges to take medication, eat and exercise. GiraffPlus, an EU-based project, is a telepresence robot (consisting of a tablet screen attached to a wheeled cart) that allows caregivers and family members to videoconference with their charges and loved ones.

GiraffPlus, Image by europa.eu

These fluffy, social, and interactive robots are not without their problems, and bring with them pressing ethical issues for the healthcare community as expressed by a number of experts in the field.

Tom Sorell, a professor of politics and philosophy who leads the Interdisciplinary Ethics Research Group at the University of Warwick in the UK, argues that an ethical framework should be developed for robotic caretakers that respect the elderly person’s autonomy and decision-making. Amanda and Noel Sharkey, computer scientists at the University of Sheffield, have highlighted the need to balance the benefits of robotic companions with the potential risks of treating elderly adults like children, or deceiving those with dementia.

Furthermore, in her latest journal publication, Amanda Sharkey says: “At the same time, insensitive use of assistive robots could have a negative effect on the access of vulnerable seniors to certain capabilities … Increased use of assistive robots in general could lead to a reduced number of interactions with humans, and so reduce older people’s opportunities for social interaction and affiliation with others”.

As we continue to explore this topic this, our latest poll question was about how much interaction between a senior and a robot caregiver is socially acceptable. Here are the results:

First, according to the results, our readers do not feel strongly about the need to regulate the amount of interaction seniors have with robot caregivers: almost half (48%) of the respondents said that this is purely a matter of preference of the individual seniors. In addition, 34% of our respondents stated that any amount of interaction with a robot is acceptable, although more people sharing this view qualified this with the phrase “as long as the senior gets some human interaction on a regular basis.”

More interestingly, only 2% of the respondents chose the option that involved a regulatory body to determine the right amount of interaction. Is this because people do not feel that the amount of interaction with robots is something that should be regulated in any way, or because people do not have faith in regulatory bodies to make appropriate decisions for us? The dominant support for the use of senior’s preferences seems to suggest the former. Also worth noting is the fact that only 10% of the respondents said that maximum interaction with humans and minimum interaction with robots is best.

This indicates that the majority of our respondents, most of whom are roboticists or related to robotics in some way, trust seniors to make preferential choices by themselves on this topic, and that the amount of interaction with care robots is not seen to pose a major point of concern.

This question we posed to poll-takers did not take into account the cognitive capabilities of the senior in question. Would our view of  how much seniors should interact with care robots change as we consider seniors with varying degrees of cognitive capabilities? And how to address the fact that cognitive abilities deteriorate with age? More for us to think about in a future poll.

Do you have questions or topics you’d like ORi and Robohub to cover in our poll-based discussions? Send us an email (ajung@openroboethics.org). 

The results of the poll presented in this post have been analyzed and prepared by Camilla Bassani, with the help of AJung Moon, Shalaleh Rismani, Rohan Nuttall, Joost Hilte, and Julio Vazquez at the Open Roboethics initiative.

We have a tall order when it comes to dreaming up a trustworthy care robot: a robot could clean the house, find and fetch objects, and even keep seniors company. But if robots take on so many daily care tasks for the elderly, is it possible that seniors will have to interact with them too much? Is there such a thing as a socially acceptable amount of interaction with a care robot? Let us know what you think as we continue our reader polls about care robots.

Developing robots that are capable of taking care of seniors is the goal of an increasing number of robotics companies. While there are many economic and social factors to encourage this trend, the ethical issues pertaining to the use of robots as caregivers requires careful consideration. Data from our latest poll suggest that readers are optimistic about the role of robots as care assistants for senior members of their families.

In particular, a number of roboethicists have voiced concerns about the possibility that care robots will further isolate the seniors from social contact. Social isolation of seniors is a global issue and a known health risk for seniors. For example, in the UK, 17% of seniors have less than weekly, and 11% have less than monthly, contact with family, friends, or neighbours; in Canada, 20% of seniors do not participate in any weekly or monthly social activities; in the United States, 28% of seniors aged 65 and older lived alone in 2010 — that’s about 11.8 million people —  and the number increases as they age.

Somewhere hidden in these statistics is the fact that the caregivers of these seniors (if they have one) naturally take on the role of providing some level of social interaction with the seniors on a regular basis. If robots are recruited to fill the role of caregivers, would this further isolate seniors?

Some people suggest that a social and interactive care robot could keep seniors company. Others conjecture that care robots will be useful in some ways, but perhaps not enough to provide the type of human social interactions that people need. However, it could provide a mechanism through which seniors can connect with family and friends, a Skype-on-wheels system for example.

According to the results from our poll, the majority of our participants were of the opinion that robots will enable seniors to socialize with other people better, using teleconferencing systems such as Skype/FaceTime. However, they were split on whether a robot itself will be able to keep a senior company. While the majority (53%) said that the robot itself will be successful in keeping seniors company and also enable seniors to socialize with others, 28% said that only the latter will be true. Only 6% of our participants said that, while a robot will be successful in keeping seniors company, it will result in further social isolation.

It is difficult to draw definitive conclusions based on the small number of respondents who participated in this poll. But we did observe an interesting trend. The majority of participants who self-reported as having a background in robotics or related technical field/profession (60%) said that robots will be successful in keeping seniors company and allow social interactions with other people; only 44% of non-roboticists said the same.

Despite the optimism (at least by the robotics community), there remains concern that dependence on robot caregivers could reduce physical human contact, even if it helps facilitate remote social interactions. If forms of socializing fall into a ‘social interaction hierarchy’ of sorts, with in-person interactions being considered the most valuable, will increased remote socialization come to be considered as ‘better than nothing’ even if it becomes an excuse for infrequent in-person interactions? We’ll follow this question up in a future poll, and in the mean time leave that question up to you to discuss with the seniors in your network.

When we asked about our participants’ comfort level in having robots to perform particular daily care activities, we found that 66% of people would be comfortable having a robot entertain and socialize with senior members of their family, echoing the optimism mentioned above.

In general, tasks that people felt comfortable transferring to a robot were those that do not require physical contact with the senior. For example, reminding seniors to take medication (94%), detecting and alerting others when the senior experiences a fall (91%), and cleaning the house (84%) were tasks that received the most number of votes, and coincided with robotic solutions that are actively being explored or exist already.

Meanwhile, more interactive forms of care, such as helping seniors to take a bath (47%), get dressed (50%), or use the toilet (56%) received relatively fewer votes, along with food-related tasks such as cooking for (59%) and feeding (59%) seniors.

The relationship between this trend and safety concerns, users’ sense of personal control, and other factors requires further investigation. The fact that only about half of participants feel comfortable having a robot help seniors take a bath or assist with personal hygiene provides an interesting perspective to the use of robots for the potentially essential care task. From our earlier poll-based discussion on bathing, we found that robot bath assistants have the advantage of providing privacy, while this benefit may need careful balancing with the sense of control it provides to its users. People’s comfort level in using robots for such highly physical and private care tasks may need some convincing trial runs before consumers feel comfortable with them.

Do you have questions or topics you’d like ORi and Robohub to cover in our poll-based discussions? Send us an email (ajung@openroboethics.org). 

The results of the poll presented in this post have been analyzed and written by AJung Moon, Mike Van der Loos, Shalaleh Rismani, Joost Hilte, Julio Vazquez and Elizabeth Croft at the Open Roboethics initiative.

A robot hands a medication bottle to a person. Photo credit: Keith Bujak. Source: Georgia Tech News Center

One of the driving forces of social, interactive robotics is the issue of impending labour shortage, which is projected to be one of the major and inevitable consequences of the ageing population phenomenon.

That includes developing personal robots that seniors can have at home, so that more seniors can enjoy independent living for a longer period of time without needing the assistance of a human nurse. But, for many years, experts have expressed concerns about what type or use of robots is appropriate or should be allowed. Help us voice your opinion on this topic by participating in our short poll below.

Why make bathing robots in the first place? Those who develop bathing robots in Japan (e.g., Sanyo Electric Company) and those conducting research about bathing robots (e.g., Chih-Hung King et al., at Georgia Tech) make the following arguments:

1. Bathing robots will bring about economic advantage in supporting the growing elderly population
2. They can help increase the sense of privacy, independence and quality of life for the elderly being supported.

With these possible advantages in mind, how does the societal acceptance of these robots compare? And how does this interact with the varying level of autonomy a robot can have?

In our latest reader poll, we asked “What level of autonomy would you be comfortable with?” in a bathing robot.

As shown in the figure below, respondents generally accept and trust the idea of bathing robots: almost half said that they would prefer the robot to operate with a full level of autonomy without human supervision, another 39% of the participants said that they’d be comfortable giving partial control to the robot, and 13% said they would prefer full-autonomy that included human supervision. Only 4% of the participants said that they would prefer that the robot had no autonomy.

We also examined the reasons why people would be comfortable with more autonomous operation of bathing robots than others. We found that the reasons are in a careful balance of two key factors: privacy and the need to control.

The main reason people gave in choosing full autonomy is that bathing is a private experience and one that is uncomfortable in the presence of a human caregiver. This seems to echo the arguments of the manufacturers and researchers studying this area, as described above.

On the other hand, the participants who are comfortable with only a partially autonomous robot didn’t quite trust that the fully autonomous version of the technology would be safe enough to use alone. For some people, having more manual control over the robot (semi to no autonomy) isn’t just about safety, it’s also about the ability to customize and control their bathing experience in order to improve comfort. A few participants also expressed concern for their privacy in relation to the robot (as opposed to the more common desire to maintain privacy in relation to a human caregiver).

While the notion of privacy varies from culture to culture, and further research could be done to study the cultural differences in the acceptance of robot bathing assistants, these results suggest that autonomous bath robots could be accepted by consumers so long as the user feels safe and in control of the robot.

The results of the poll presented in this post have been analyzed and written by Shalaleh Rismani and AJung Moon at the Open Roboethics initiative.

The devices that we interact with in our everyday lives are getting ‘smarter’: we wear smart watches, carry smart phones, and many of us are now living in smart homes that are equipped with intelligent automated devices. Some of these home devices, such as thermostats and lights, can already communicate with smart phones, so that you can control them without even having to be there.

As our homes become increasingly automated, will we eventually be living inside what is essentially a robot?  Given that smart homes can collect data and learn about your daily habits, and come up with the optimum time to turn on/off different devices in the home, what should this giant robot optimize for?

A few years ago, researchers at the University of British Columbia (AJung Moon, Peter Danielson and Mike Van der Loos) studied the public acceptance of a number of different robots. That included the discussion of a Japanese robot from Sanyo Electric in 2004 dedicated to bathing the elderly. Since then, there have been developments in the topic of robot baths, for example, Cody, a robot from Georgia Tech, has a compliant arm that can be used to wipe people for giving bed baths for patients (see video above).

An interesting theme that came up from our discussions on this topic was that of control. Bathing is typically a private activity, and a robot bath assistant could offer dignity, but when is this trumped by the need to control the robot? 

Let us know below:

Why would you want to buy a robot for your home? When we asked our readers this question, the majority (75%) said that they’d want a robot “to help me with house chores”. In contrast, all other reasons we thought may tempt people to purchase robots received less than 50% of votes. In fact, the second most popular response was “Just to check it out, as an early adopter” (43%), which may be indicative of our reader demographics at Robohub.

Maybe this is because a lot of people already own robotic vacuum cleaners, such as Roomba from iRobot. And maybe this response will change once Pepper hits the market early next year and the pre-sold 4800 units of JIBO starts rolling out to developers and people’s homes in about 1~1.5 years from now.

But it’s interesting that most Robohub readers are looking for a robot to fulfill functional purposes (at least for the time being), despite the fact that a number of companies are marketing their robots as companions. In fact, only 19% of our readers indicated that they would buy a robot “as a companion for my family members” and 17% said “as my own companion / pet replacement”. Note that readers could choose multiple answers to this question (i.e., some people said that they’d get a robot as a companion for themselves, as well as for their family members).

Home robots in the next five years: Will they feel like your companion? 

We also asked our readers about whether robots will be able to be suitable companions in the near future. Results from our poll indicate that the majority of people are skeptical about this notion. In fact, 55% of the readers said that home robots will be more like smart tools/toys/appliances than something that elicits a sense of companionship. This echoes the results from the first question that having a robot as a companion isn’t really something that majority of people would buy a robot for, nor something they think is possible in the near future. However, 33% said robots would be capable of eliciting companionship within the next five years, suggesting that while this may not be the majority opinion, quite a significant number of people expect home robots to elicit a sense of companionship in us fairly soon.

Some readers provide interesting variants to the poll responses: One reader explicitly stated that s/he’d like an assistant robot, instead of a companion robot, whereas another reader indicated that the answer is somewhere between an appliance and a companion.

Primary reasons for considering to purchase a robot for the home

 It’s no secret that a lot of research in human-robot interaction and a number of robotics start-up projects are motivated by the possibility that robots can provide a solution to ageing demographics problem: some expect robots to provide physical assistance to caregivers / nurses so that they can care for more number of seniors; others seek to build robots that can allow seniors to live independently, rather than in senior homes. Meanwhile, a number of academics have been advocating the field to approach this with caution (e.g., Drs. Amanda and Noel Sharkey wrote about this topic in 2010, followed by many others), while some research has been dedicated counter cautionary tales by demonstrating positive effects of introducing robots to senior population.

We were curious about how receptive our readers are about having a personal robot for members of the family, including elderly members. When we asked which member of their family they think can benefit from a personal robot, 77% of our readers indicated that they themselves would benefit from it, while 60% said their parents/grand parents would benefit, and  and 51% said their children would. Those who voted “other” indicated that their significant others, or their pet(s) could benefit from having a robot at home.

This is positive news for start-ups and researchers looking to develop robots for the elderly population. In general, people are receptive to the idea of robots for their parents/grand parents, although less receptive to the idea for the children in the family.

As home robots become more commonplace, it will be interesting to see how our acceptance of home robots change. For now, the members of the Open Roboethics initiative will work to capture the state of your opinions on the topic of robots for home and for care.

That being said, if you’d like us to cover a specific poll, perhaps a case study or a topic within the ‘robots at home / for care’ context that you’d like to get our readers to discuss, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Looking into the near future, what do you think about robots being developed for your home or being present as a companion? Share your thoughts with us now; we’ll report our findings in two weeks.

One Forbes article published last year by Chunka Mui focused the jobs issue on autonomous cars. In the article titled “Will The Google Car Force A Choice Between Lives And Jobs?”, Mui says that even if more jobs will be lost as people start to adopt autonomous car technology, he’d support autonomous cars because they will ultimately help save more lives. Indeed, in our earlier poll we found that one of the top benefits of autonomous cars as voted by our participants is in reduction/prevention of traffic accidents.

Two weeks ago, we posed the jobs questions to you. Here’s what you had to say:

Which jobs would most likely be displaced or created?

When we asked which jobs are more likely to be displaced, almost all participants (95%) pointed to taxi drivers. It doesn’t really take much imagination to conjure up the images of an autonomous car driving around as a taxi cab of the future. But this image brings up some interesting implications. Mui thinks autonomous cars might do to taxi drivers what self-service and home laundry machines did to the laundry business a few decades ago — one of two trades that used to be a go-to means of living for landed Chinese immigrants to the United States until it went obsolete in 1970s. Mui says:

Just as washing machines eliminated Chinese laundries, fully driverless vehicles would eliminate many professional driving jobs—including many, like taxi-driving, that form an economic bridge for current immigrants.

It’s not just the taxi drivers that people perceive to be in danger of being displaced by autonomous cars. Over 60% of people said that public transit workers (e.g., bus drivers), large goods delivery people (e.g., truckers), and small goods delivery people (e.g., pizza delivery) are all in danger of being displaced by the technology (69%, 67%, and 61% respectively). Fewer votes went to parking attendants or police (45%), auto insurance jobs (41%), traffic police (39%) and auto machanics (9%).

We had to be a little bit more imaginative with the jobs that may be created with the rise of autonomous cars. All participants agreed that there will jobs will be created in at least one area, the most popular of which will be jobs in autonomous car design and development (78%). This was followed by jobs in building new infrastructure for autonomous cars (67%) such as new types of parking spaces, and businesses that involve autonomous cars (55%) such as services that use autonomous cars as a mobile storage unit. Fewer votes went to more blue collar jobs such as new type of delivery and service jobs (36%) such as personalized flower deliveries by a person for that extra ‘human touch’, jobs in autonomous car manufacturing (e.g., workers at automotive factories, 33%), new insurance-related jobs (20%) and auto mechanics (16%).

Do you think more jobs will be created than displaced?

Given the type of jobs that people expect to be displaced or created by the technology, we were curious whether the outlook on the jobs issue was more positive or negative in people’s minds. According to our poll results, 73% of our readers believe more jobs will be displaced by the autonomous cars technology. Only 19% of readers said that more jobs will be created.

This is in contrast to a more generic recent report by Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan fact tank group in the US, which indicated that 52% of experts surveyed believe AI and robotics (not autonomous cars in particular) will have an overall positive or neutral impact on jobs. It may be harder to make a prediction about the general impact of AI and robotics on jobs than it is to make a prediction about the impact of a specific technology like autonomous cars, but for now it seems that most people are expecting the job market to be gloomier as autonomous cars start to hit the road mainstream.

Overall, do you think autonomous cars will have a positive impact on our society?

Perhaps the bigger question is whether we think the jobs issue outweighs the value of the technology. Even if more jobs will be displaced, would we still want autonomous cars? The answer from our participants is a loud and clear ‘yes’. In fact, only one participant (2%) said that the cars will have an overall negative effect, in contrast to 90% of participants who voted in the positive.

In a way, it seems to tell us that the jobs question doesn’t matter as much when it comes to discussing autonomous cars. Some of the anticipated benefits of the technology may just be big enough to compensate for the negative impact it may bring to our jobs. This is good news for those investing in the technology. But how can we better prepare for the future? Should all taxi drivers learn to code and design so that they can join the foreseeable new job openings in autonomous car design and development?

Lee Vinsel, an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology paints an interesting picture. In his December 2013 blog post, Autonomous Vehicles and the Labour Question,

Some even claim that the answer is that everyone should learn to code (as if we are all going to join the technical elite). Yet, we live in a increasingly unequal society, and our use of technology plays a central role in this troubling trend. Silicon Valley famously has an inverted bell curve around education. It’s a society made up of, on one side, hyper-educated, wealthy elites and, on the other, uneducated people who work for the wealthy, care for their children, and keep their lawns looking beautiful. Our use of labor-saving technology, like autonomous cars, only exacerbates this divide. American society has been remarkably tolerant of replacing people with machines and the technological unemployment such adoption entails. Perhaps we will grow less tolerant of it as data mining systems drastically reduce the need for lawyers and medical robots dramatically decrease the number of surgeons necessary. What are we going to do all day?

It will be interesting to see how the answers to these questions change if and when we start to see fully autonomous cars on the road, perhaps forcing us to keep our resumes up to date. For now, we will have to leave the discussion here.

What ORi and Robohub found out about autonomous cars

The Open Roboethics initiative (ORi) have been designing and publishing biweekly polls and discussing the topic of autonomous cars with Robohub since late April of this year.

We opened our discussion by asking what people think about autonomous cars technology, found out that people are more reluctant to let children ride the cars alone than they are with unlicensed blind people or seniors, and that we are torn in terms of who should be responsible if an autonomous car were to get a speeding ticket. We found that people are OK with empty cars roaming around the streets by itself, but not OK with people under the influence of drugs or alcohol hopping behind the wheels if the car requires at least some input from the passenger/driver.

While people were split on whether they will miss driving as fully autonomous cars become mainstream, we also reminisced about the films from the 80’s and the cars that can talk to us when we imagined the kind of ways we’d like to interface with our future robotic cars.

We pondered about some tough ethical dilemma questions about how a car should behave when an accident is unavoidable and why. Through a set of dilemma situations, we learned about the complex implications of designing optimization algorithms for unavoidable crashes leading some of us to prefer random decision making than informed ones.

We feel that we’ve learned a lot in a relatively short period of time, and it’s thanks to all of you who have read our analyses, taken polls, and provided us with your comments. Now it’s time for us to conclude our discussion on this topic and move on to a new one — but don’t worry, it’ll be just as exciting. With a big thank you, we’ll be back tomorrow with a brand new poll discussion on a brand new topic.

The results of the poll presented in this post have been analyzed and written by AJung Moon, Mike Van der Loos, Shalaleh Rismani, Camilla Bassani, and Jason Millar at the Open Roboethics initiative.

We think this question is also an interesting one when it comes to how autonomous cars will impact the society, especially as it pertains to our jobs. Let us know what you think below. As always, we’ll be discussing the results of this poll in two weeks.

The idea of autonomous cars that can communicate with each other and organize themselves to better control the flow of traffic sounds interesting and possibly scary at the same time. In our latest poll, the Open Roboethics initiative and Robohub wanted to find out whether people are supportive or skeptical of the idea of such network of cars.

Results of the poll shows that most people see such cars to save time for them and reduce the number of collisions, because the network of cars will be orderly and able to decrease the chance of you getting stuck in traffic jams. These two reasons echo our findings from the very first poll Open Roboethics initiative and Robohub have published on the topic of autonomous cars in May. When we asked about the main advantages of owning an autonomous car, “reduced number of traffic accidents” and “saving of time that would have otherwise been spent on driving” were the two most popular answers.

When asked about the potential harms of such network of autonomous cars, the most popular answer (53%) was that it may lead to invasion of privacy, followed by 45% of participants expressing the concerns that accidents can happen from technical glitches and 39% expressing decrease in safety due to the potential of the cars being hacked or abused. From this result, can we say that more people are worried about negative aspects what may come incorporated into such cars by design (privacy issues and technical glitches) than the possibility of a third party (a hacker) hacking or abusing the system? We are not quite ready to make such statement with the limited data we’ve collected from this poll. But given that hacking a car has recently been reported as being fairly easy, people’s worries about the possibility of autonomous car hacking may change in the future.

Overall, though, it seems that people are quite open to the idea of cars that can communicate and self-organize. Only 15% of participants said no to such technology, whereas 85% said yes. This is an optimistic result for a potential technology that may come after we’ve adopted autonomous cars in our everyday lives already. But people’s perception on this may change depending on how well autonomous cars without the communicative, self-organizing feature fares.

As stated in the WIRED article, autonomous cars are within our foreseeable future. Designing a system where autonomous cars self-organize is an option that engineers and scientists are exploring because of its possible benefits. Imagine the future where autonomous cars are the norm, and each car can talk to one another regulate the flow of traffic.

How would you feel about your car being a part of such network of autonomous cars? What do you think are the possible benefits and harms?

When we asked our readers, ‘should the unlicensed be allowed to ride in autonomous cars alone?’ we found some surprising results. While over half of the participants (52%) were opposed to having children ride in autonomous cars alone, a majority of participants were supportive of unlicensed seniors and legally blind persons riding in the cars alone (67% and 58% respectively).

This made us curious about some of the key factors that may be at play in answering the question of who should be allowed to ride in autonomous cars. More specifically, how do people feel about autonomous cars driving around the city streets without a passenger? What if the passenger is drunk or under the influence of drugs? We explored this topic in our latest poll.

Should a fully autonomous car be able to drive around city streets without a human passenger?

If people have genuine distrust toward autonomous cars, then we should expect them to oppose the idea of autonomous cars driving around without a passenger — regardless of the added convenience from a car that drops you off at your destination and goes off by itself to park.

But our results suggest that we don’t really have the issue of pure distrust toward autonomous cars. The majority of participants (80%) supported the idea of a car driving by itself without a passenger, while only 11% opposed the idea. Some of those falling in the ‘other’ category conditionally supported this:

“Not without purpose. i.e., If someone ordered a car then yes, otherwise no.” (Participant 43)

Should an adult under the influence of drugs or alcohol be allowed to ride in autonomous cars?

When we asked our participants whether an adult under the influence of performance impairing substance (e.g., drugs or alcohol) should be allowed to ride an autonomous car alone, the result showed drastic difference depending on whether the car requires human input or not. In general, if the car never requires human input, 94% of participants were supportive of an adult riding in autonomous cars regardless of whether the person is drunk or under the influence of drugs. On the other hand, a majority of participants (77%) opposed this idea if the car sometimes requires human input.

In short, it seems people trust the autonomous controls of a car more than a human passenger if drugs or alcohol are in the mix. Given this and our earlier results it seems that, perhaps unsurprisingly, decision making abilities and the level of autonomy of the car are major factors that should be taken into account when it comes to your qualifications to ride in an autonomous car alone.

It is interesting, however, that more people are supportive of a drunk or high passenger riding in a fully autonomous car (one that never requires human input) than having an autonomous car roam the streets without any passengers. From passenger safety point of view, an empty car that gets into an accident would not put any passenger’s life in danger — whether the accident involves physical harm to pedestrians would depend on the accident. Perhaps this irony stems from the fact that having a passenger inside a car would make it easier to hold a person (likely the passenger) responsible for accidents.

Regardless of the reasons for this contrasting result, one thing is clear: even when we have autonomous cars, drinking and driving is going to be a tough sell!

The results of the poll presented in this post have been analyzed and written by AJung Moon, Jason Millar, Shalaleh Rismani, and Camilla Bassani at the Open Roboethics initiative.

Image by Robert Lachenman

A couple of months ago, we asked our readers whether three different unlicensed groups of individuals should be able to ride in autonomous cars alone. The individuals were: a child under the legal driving age, a senior who is no longer licensed to drive, and a legally blind person.

One of the most interesting results from the poll was that people are not as supportive of having children ride the cars alone than they are about a senior or a blind person. Discussions that ensued from this with the Robohub editor, Hallie Siegel, was whether people’s sentiment will be different about a car that drives without a passenger, or a passenger who are drunk or under the influence of drugs.

Let us know what you think by answering the quick three questions below:

Driving has become an integral component of our daily lives, especially in developed countries. Cars are not just a means for us to get from point A to point B. They also help us express our personality and show off our character and competencies in the way we drive. For example, a Dodge Charger commercial from three years ago makes this point explicit with the phrase “leader of human resistance.” The Huffington Post UK’s recent (entertaining) video interview shows that the public’s opinion on autonomous cars seems to be mixed in terms of whether people will be willing to give up their driving experience.

Realizing that the task of driving can be a valued, personal activity, we wondered whether people will miss the experience of driving once autonomous cars become more available in the consumer market.

Would you miss the experience of driving?

In our last poll, we asked whether you would miss driving an autonomous car and why. There is a clear half-way split in the answers that were provided. Half of the participants said they would miss driving and the other half would not. Considering the results, it is likely that the experience of “driving” an autonomous car, or how the autonomous car will replace/supplement people’s current driving experience will influence people’s decision to own one — meaning that user experience designers of autonomous cars have some interesting challenges to deal with.

Should the experience of riding in an autonomous car be radically different than the cars we own today? For example, the latest self-driving car from Google looks quite a bit different from today’s typical cars in that it does not have steering wheels, accelerators or brakes. Despite the fact that a significant portion of people will miss driving non-autonomous cars, it is possible that we will quickly start to embrace a different driving experience that an autonomous car has to offer.

Why would you miss driving?

There seem to be two major themes in the reasons why people said they would miss driving: control and pleasure.

Driving a car can give us a sense of control. Dan Gilbert mentions in his book “Pursuit of Happiness”, having a sense of control makes us feel happy. Driving is a skill that people can strive to improve, and many people enjoy a sense of pride when they get praised for their driving ability. Pleasure of driving can, of course, come from the sense of control people get when they drive: for example, a driver has the power to choose whether to disobey traffic laws, and have complete control of how the car gets to the destination. But for some of us, driving can also be just a relaxing activity. Sometimes, people use the driving time as the time they get to take their minds off of possibly stressful events from the day.

Outside the context of human-driven cars, it is perhaps difficult to emulate the pleasures of manual driving or joyriding. But maybe autonomous cars will provide us with more advanced versions of KITT (a talking car from the 80’s TV series “Knight Rider”) in the future, and give us a different thrill out of driving.

Why would you NOT miss driving?

Driving is not all about pleasure. Most of us have experienced long traffic jams, road rage and frustrating accidents. Can autonomous cars offer a more enjoyable experience?

Participants who said they would not miss driving had two main thematic reasons: 1. Improved functionality in terms of safety, efficiency and accessibility 2. Improved user experience due to lack of stress. Indeed, not everyone enjoys driving. Some find it so stressful that they refuse to drive. To most people, the main point of a car is to get them from one place to another, and they would not care less about the driving experience itself. As our results indicate, some people expect to be able to work on other perhaps more enjoyable/important tasks if cars start driving themselves.

Most of us have not been on an autonomous car. Therefore, it is challenging to predict how much we will miss our non-autonomous cars in the future, and whether the sentiment will matter in our society’s adoption of the technology after all.

What is clear is that a significant percentage of people today take pleasure in driving and a sense of control it provides; on the other hand, many of us are ready to shift gears to a safer and more efficient passenger experience.

The results of the poll presented in this post have been analyzed and written by Shalaleh Rismani, AJung Moon, and Camilla Bassani at the Open Roboethics initiative.

A few weeks ago, one of our readers, Javier Lopez, submitted a number of questions to the ORi team. He brought up many interesting points, and we won’t attempt to cover them all in one poll. But one of them had to do with the fact that some people actually enjoy the driving experience, and may not be willing to trade it for convenience. Perhaps this might be just another issue of preference, similar to how some people still prefer to drive a stick shift (standard/manual transmission) over automated transmission.

So we’d like to know what you think. Will you miss driving your non-autonomous car? Why or why not?

Given a choice between crashing into a motorcyclist wearing a helmet vs. a motorcyclist who isn’t wearing one, which one should an autonomous car be programmed to crash into? What about the choice between crashing into an SUV vs. a compact car?

These are some of the dilemma situations Professor Patrick Lin brought forth in his WIRED article, The Robot Car of Tomorrow May Just be Programmed to Hit You.

Lin says that programming a car to collide with any particular kind of object over another seems like a targeting algorithm. Accidents involving human drivers typically involve people’s split-second, instinctive responses to the situation. Your first autonomous car of the near future, however, will probably come equipped with a crash-optimization algorithm – a deliberately designed algorithm that will determine the outcome of all potential crashes. As Lin points out in his article, the pre-meditated nature of such algorithm creates a load of interesting issues that calls for a broader discussion on the topic.

So two weeks ago we, the members of the Open Roboethics initiative and the Robohub family, decided to help continue the discussion by conducting our reader poll on this very topic.

Scenario 1: Motorcyclists with / without a helmet

Given the choice between the two motorcyclists (one wearing a helmet, and one not), we asked our readers who an autonomous car should crash into. Choosing to hit the helmet wearing motorcyclist would perhaps minimize overall harm done. But considering the perspective of the motorcyclist who took that extra few minutes to put on a helmet for safety reasons, such programmed decision by an autonomous car doesn’t seem fair. Indeed, only 2% of our participants said that the car should crash into the biker wearing a helmet because s/he has better chances of survival. Lin points out that choosing to hit the biker wearing a helmet might discourage bikers from wearing helmets.

Crashing into the biker not wearing a helmet wasn’t a popular choice either (10%). In fact, our most popular response (45%) was that the car should hit the brakes and do nothing else, leaving it up to chance to determine which biker gets hit. And 3% of participants provided us with a similar response, where they said the car should run a random number generator to make a random decision. This means that almost half (48%) of our participants advocating for random chance to decide the outcome of the crash.

Relatedly, 30% of our participants said that the car shouldn’t have the ability to detect whether a biker is wearing a helmet or not. Given that a decision made by random chance does not make intelligent use of sensed data, effectively 78% of our participants are voting for autonomous cars to not use certain sensed data in making crash decisions.

But not using available information in crash decisions doesn’t seem like a straight forward solution to crash-optimization. Lin says,

“Not using that information in crash-optimization calculations may not be enough. To be in the ethical clear, autonomous cars may need to not collect that information at all. Should they be in possession of the information, and using it could have minimized harm or saved a life, there could be legal liability in failing to use that information.”

Scenario 2: Hit the SUV or a compact car?

An odd sense of unfairness also exists if we consider another crash scenario. Let’s say the car has a choice between an SUV and a compact car to unavoidably crash into. The car could be programmed to hit the SUV over a compact car, since bigger cars with perhaps better safety ratings could better absorb impact from the collision and minimize overall harm from the crash.

The responses we got are similar to the first scenario: 37% opted for the car to simply engage the brakes and do nothing else regardless of which car gets hit, and 25% said that the cars shouldn’t have the ability to detect the make/model of the cars around it.

A slight difference from the first scenario is that 20% said that the car should crash into the SUV (a minimum overall harm option), and only 3% said the car should crash into the compact car. In the first scenario, the option that yields minimum overall harm (hit the motorcyclist with a helmet) only received 2% support as compared to 20%.

This might have something to do with the fact that people’s decision to drive a certain make or model of a car is not illegal, nor an activity that typically increases risks of driving. So no one is really doing anything wrong by driving a compact car or an SUV, whereas the motorcyclist wearing a helmet has a moral/legal high ground over the other motorcyclist.

Regardless, if we were to have crash-optimization algorithms that biasedly crash into SUVs over smaller cars, it will surely have an impact on the consumer market. The rates of insurance for these supposedly more safe cars may go up, because buying a safer car may also mean a higher probability of being crashed into by an autonomous car – yikes!

Is it OK for a car to always choose to crash into non-law-abiding citizens?

So how does moral or legal high ground of individuals on the road impact people’s decisions about who should be hit? We asked our readers whether it’s OK for a car to always choose to crash into those not following traffic laws over those who are, assuming that the car can detect it. Considering the first scenario, it is illegal to ride a motorcycle without a helmet in many countries/states. According to our results, law-abiding status of people on the road doesn’t seem to be a popular variable to optimize for crashes. The majority of respondents said it is not OK (70%), whereas only 20% said it is OK for cars to biasedly crash into non-law-abiding citizens.

It is true that by answering ‘yes’ to this question, you’d have to be OK with the idea that the car might always choose the one less likely to survive from a crash. Although we have traffic laws in place to regulate the rules of the road and maintain social order, using it to make life/death decisions in this manner may not be something people are comfortable with.

How should an autonomous car respond to unavoidable crashes?

So how should an autonomous car respond to unavoidable crashes? Is there a general rule that people are more in support of? According to our results, majority of our participants (52%) are in favour of minimizing overall harm to both pedestrians and passengers by spreading out harms. But it seems that the rest of the participants are quite divided: 20% of people support to minimize harm to pedestrians at the expense of passengers, while 13% supports the opposite.

This reminds us of a recent reader poll discussion we had on a different crash dilemma situation, in which a large number of participants (64%) said an autonomous car should save the life of its passenger over a child on the road (36%). One of the main reasons for choosing to save the passenger’s life was the notion that a car should always have its passenger’s safety as its priority over that of others. Given that the previous poll result provided such a strong support for prioritizing the passenger’s safety, it is surprising to see a contrasting result on this poll.

To find out what makes people prioritize passenger safety over pedestrians or vice versa, we’ll have to do some more detailed investigations. What is also interesting is that, although people preferred autonomous cars to take random or uninformed decisions in the two specific unavoidable crash scenarios above, the majority of people opt for minimizing overall harm to both pedestrians and passengers – an option that is likely to be the least random and in need of using the most amount of information about the passenger and pedestrians.

For now, it seems that there is much more discussion to be had before autonomous cars start making crash decisions people will be happy with. Check out our latest reader poll: When fully autonomous cars are the norm, will you miss driving?.

The results of the poll presented in this post have been analyzed and written by AJung Moon, Camilla Bassani, and Shalaleh Rismani at the Open Roboethics initiative.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Human error as a cause of vehicle crashes
• If death by autonomous car is unavoidable, who should die? Reader poll results
• Should autonomous cars be allowed to speed? Results from our reader poll
• Kids with wheels: Should the unlicensed be allowed to ‘drive’ autonomous cars?
• What should a robot do? Designing robots that know right from wrong
• Morgan Stanley reports on the economic benefits of driverless cars

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

A couple of months ago Dr. Patrick Lin, director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University, wrote an article on autonomous cars. The article, titled “The Robot Car of Tomorrow May Just Be Programmed to Hit You”, discussed intricate challenges and implications of developing collision optimization algorithms for autonomous cars.

He points out that, regardless of how rarely an autonomous car may come across unavoidable collision situations, the implications of building an algorithm that determines how it responds to the collision lie in the domain of ethics and needs much discussion.

Join us in discussing the topic by taking the poll below. As usual, we’ll present the results of this poll in two weeks.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• How do you want to interface with your autonomous car? Poll results
• My (autonomous) car, my safety: Results from our reader poll
• Human error as a cause of vehicle crashes
• If death by autonomous car is unavoidable, who should die? Reader poll results
• Should autonomous cars be allowed to speed? Results from our reader poll
• Kids with wheels: Should the unlicensed be allowed to ‘drive’ autonomous cars?
• What should a robot do? Designing robots that know right from wrong
• Morgan Stanley reports on the economic benefits of driverless cars

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Those of you who watched the 80’s TV series “Knight Rider” might remember the dialogue between Michael Knight and its super-car, KITT. Some of you might be more familiar with scenes between “Johnny cab” and Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in “Total Recall” (1990). In both of these films, and many others of the past, people have imagined being able to talk to cars. How would you like to interact with an autonomous car? 

In our previous poll, we discussed a moral dilemma involving an autonomous car called the Tunnel Problem. In it, the car needs to decide whether to save a child’s life or that of its passenger. Of course we hope that no autonomous car will ever come across this kind of scenario, but it is inevitable that autonomous cars will one day have to deviate from their planned course of action and make a decision on their own — they are autonomous, after all! And in such situations, there will be times when the car will need to alert its passenger about what is happening, and sometimes request assistance from a human decision-maker.

How do you want an autonomous car to alert you?

How should an autonomous car alert its passenger(s)? We were curious about people’s expectations and preferences … do people want conventional cars with autonomous features, or a futuristic cars with more bells and whistles?

Our reader poll results suggest that people like the idea of being able to talk to their cars. In fact, 77% of our participants chose voice or sound as the preferred method for a car to alert its passengers upon deviation from planned actions. This choice is probably not motivated by our nostalgia for 80’s sci-fi as much as for more practical reasons. Since the car will be doing the driving while the passenger is otherwise preoccupied or sleeping, auditory alerts would be a highly effective means to draw the passenger’s attention. In fact, all the respondents who indicated only one choice to this multi-choice question chose sound, suggesting that they consider sound to be the most acceptable means for a car to alert its passengers. The use of visual cues also got many votes (71%), while the use of haptic cues was supported by far fewer (27%).

How would you like to give instructions to an autonomous car?

In this question, we consider the other side of the communication equation — from the passenger to car. Most respondents said they would prefer using a touch screen (73%) to communicate with an autonomous car. Using voice commands, however, was a close second (65%). Also, most of those who chose to be alerted using sound in the first question also indicated that they would prefer to use voice commands to instruct the car.

Not surprisingly, touch screens and voice commands are what we use to interact with technology that is ubiquitous today — our tablets and smartphones. This could mean that people imagine that their interaction with autonomous vehicles will be similar to their interactions with other technological devices we use everyday.

Some of the participants suggested using a smartphone or a laptop to interface with the car, and it turns out that this is idea already being pursued. In fact, Bosch is developing a tablet interface for highly automated driving user experience. Researchers at Freie University of Berlin developed an iPad software solution, called iDriver, that can remotely control an autonomous car and allows passengers to monitor the car’s sensor data. Even more important, both Apple and Google have unveiled plans to get their mobile operating systems (iOS and Android) — usually found in phones and tablets — running in cars.

But who cares how you interface with the car, or how the car interfaces with you? Well, our data seems to tells us that people actually do care about user interface. In fact only the 2% picked the “I don’t care” option in the first question, and no one chose this option in the second question.

What parameters would you like to be able to set on your autonomous car?

Once again, the importance of Human Machine Interface is highlighted here. 69% of the participants said that they’d like to be able to set how their car alerts them. Equally popular was the ability to determine the route the car takes to reach the destination (69%). Practical parameters, such as speed limit (54%) and driving efficiency (50%) were also important to respondents, whereas what might be perceived as more social parameters (e.g.“what kind of driver personality it conveys” and how strictly the car follows the speed limit) did not get very many votes (38%).

Would you like to be able to see what the autonomous car can see? Why?

One of the biggest differences between conventional cars and autonomous cars is the amount of sensing the car needs to do, and therefore the amount of data available. Our participants seem to be really interested in seeing the world through their car’s eyes … well, sensors. In fact, 70% of them answered positively to this question. Reasons for this choice can be summarized into three main groups:

• Reassurance/Diagnostics: The majority of participants stated that this feature will increase their sense of control and reassurance (e.g., “Being aware of what the car is able to see would make me feel safe.”) and that they’d use the data to diagnose the car. (e.g., “to control, if anything is detected correctly”, “So I know that it can really drive for me and isn’t missing anything that can lead to accident.”)
• Cool factor: Participants in this group wanted the visualization feature for the cool factor (e.g., “I would like the option, mostly just because I think it would be cool.”)
• Curiosity: And some of us seem to be just curious about the technology (e.g., “It will give me a better understanding of the inner workings of the car. It will provide some transparency of the design, including the abilities/limits, of the car.”, “Because I’m curious to know what happens under the hood.”)

We think the reassurance factor is really important. One of the challenges automakers will face is the challenge of making people warm up to the technology, trust and accept it for use in everyday contexts despite inevitable accidents or hiccups along the way. Our poll results seem to be hinting at the fact that taking advantage of added features, such the visualization of the car’s surroundings, could help people feel safer riding in autonomous cars.

The results of the poll presented in this post have been analyzed and written by Camilla Bassani, AJung Moon, and Shalaleh Rismani at the Open Roboethics initiative.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• My (autonomous) car, my safety: Results from our reader poll
• Human error as a cause of vehicle crashes
• If death by autonomous car is unavoidable, who should die? Reader poll results
• Should autonomous cars be allowed to speed? Results from our reader poll
• Kids with wheels: Should the unlicensed be allowed to ‘drive’ autonomous cars?
• What should a robot do? Designing robots that know right from wrong
• Morgan Stanley reports on the economic benefits of driverless cars

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Just before entering the tunnel a child attempts to run across the road but trips in the center of the lane, effectively blocking the entrance to the tunnel. The car has only two options: continue straight, thereby hitting and killing the child, or swerve, thereby colliding into the wall on either side of the tunnel and killing you.

With the help of Jason Millar, we turned this moral dilemma – called the Tunnel Problem -into a reader poll, and provided you with some of the results last week. Now we’re going more in-depth, to provide you with some insight into the qualitative responses we received.

As we started to analyze the responses from the poll, we found that more people (64%) would choose to have the car continue straight and kill the child than to have the passengers be killed, whereas the remaining 36% of people said the car should swerve and save the child. And almost half of the participants said that it was an easy choice to make.

This seems to imply that there is lack of consensus on what an autonomous car should do, and that there must be some stark differences in the reasons why someone would choose one versus another.

Continue straight and kill the child: When we asked people about their reasons for choosing to continue straight and kill the child instead of sacrificing their own lives, the most popular reason we received (32%) was that it’s the child’s fault for being at the unsafe location. Those with kids will tell you how hard it is to always watch over your child and make sure s/he is not at a wrong place at the wrong time. But our participants shared the view that their life should not be lost because of a child who should not have been in such a dangerous area. Similarly, 13% of people said that they just like living, and would always choose their lives over the lives of others.

Others (20%) put forth the view that the car should always prioritize its passenger’s safety over that of others. Some of these responses indicated a sense of ownership.

“I bought the car. It should protect me.”– Participant 87

Another 13% of the participants also said that the car should prioritize the passenger’s safety, but not necessarily because of their sense of ownership. These participants indicated that if the cars don’t always prioritize the passenger’s safety over safety of others, then fewer people will buy the cars and this will be worse for the society overall. They seem to assume that autonomous cars will result in fewer traffic accidents, which is an assumption shared by majority of people that we have polled previously.

“If the car does not always make its passenger’s safety a priority over that of others, I don’t think people would be able to trust the technology. Having a consistent priority makes the car’s behaviour more predictable as well, which has been shown to improve people’s perception of devices.” — Participant 114

Some other, less popular, responses included the idea that an adult person’s life is worth (economically) more than that of a child (5%) and that the swerving of the car may cause a greater, perhaps unforeseen, accident (2%).

Swerve and kill the passenger (you): In contrast to those who said the car should kill the child, the most popular reasons from those choosing the car to swerve and sacrifice the passenger were those who provided altruistic reasons, such as “I’ll always choose a child’s life than mine” (36%). Some of these altruistic reasons included the idea that, since the passenger (the participant) is an adult and riding inside a car, they will take the chances of survival despite the fact that the death of the passenger upon swerving is certain in this particular scenario. Similarly, 11% of the participants indicated that, perhaps similar to the storyline of the movie “I, Robot”, they would not want to live with the guilt.

“The passenger has to live with their choice. If it was my own child I would want to make that decision. I would still feel responsible if it was the car [that] “decided”” — Participant 34

Some people (14%) said that the child should be saved because the child has more years to live. Another 14% of participants said that the car should do what a person would do in the situation, which is to swerve. Yet another 14% did not provide a reason for their answer, but said that the car should be able to slow down in time.

In contrast to the people who said the car should kill the child because the car should always prioritize its passenger’s safety over that of others, 11% of those choosing the passenger to die justified it by saying that passengers are entering into an implicit ‘risk contract’ by getting into the car.

So, who should make these decisions in the first place?

When we first looked at the results of our data we found that 44% of the
people would choose to have the passengers, while 33% would support lawmakers, to make these decisions. In fact, only 12% of participants told us they thought the designer/manufacturer should be making the decision. We thought this might be because people don’t feel comfortable relying on others to make end-of-life decisions on their behalf, and trust themselves to make better choices.

We looked into this further too.

Passengers:

We analyzed the reasons people supported passengers to make these decisions. It turns out that the majority of the reasons (55%) share the idea that the passenger should have the freedom to make these life-death decisions.

Similarly, 12% and 10% of the reasons, respectively, mentioned the fact that the passengers are the ones most affected by the situation or that they have ownership rights (i.e., “my car, my decision”), and hence should be the one to make these decisions. Quite a few of these responses (14%) also expressed their distrust toward the technology.

An interesting response also suggested that people are implicitly making a moral choice by choosing to purchase one manufacturer’s car over another, each of which may have different value systems implemented in them, and emphasized the close link between design decisions and their impact on consumers’ decisions.

Lawmakers:

Those supporting lawmakers to make these decisions were divided more or less into three camps. The first (30%) is that lawmakers will allow for fair decision making, and are the most equipped to make impartial decisions than manufacturers or passengers.

Relatedly, 27% of the responses shared the opinion that lawmakers provide the most democratically legitimate decision making, while another 27% emphasized that the cars need to be governed by a universal or standardized set of rules so that their behaviours are made consistent. Others said that making such decisions is the job of lawmakers, and that the problem in question is essentially a legal issue, requiring lawmakers to be involved (12%).

Manufacturer/Designer:

Yet some people (12%) supported the idea that manufacturers should make these decisions. This was partially because they think that lawmakers should never be trusted (13%), but mainly because they felt manufacturers have the expertise and understanding of the technology necessary to make these decisions (63%).

Taking a closer look at our readers’ responses to the Tunnel Problem, we are learning that the design and regulation of autonomous cars will require far more stakeholder discussions than other technological devices that have pervaded our daily lives. Indeed, in line with what Millar suggested in his article introducing the tunnel problem, these results tend to suggest that there are limits to the decisions designers and manufacturers of autonomous cars should make on behalf of users. While discussing every single detail of a car’s design with all stakeholders would be a challenge to manufacturers, we are hopeful that the discussions on this topic we are having with you, dear readers and participants, will help make society’s journey towards our future with autonomous cars a smooth ride.

The result of the poll presented in this post have been analyzed and written by AJung Moon, Jason Millar, Camilla Bassani, Fausto Ferreira, and Shalaleh Rismani, at the Open Roboethics initiative.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Reader poll: How would you like to interface with your autonomous car?
• Human error as a cause of vehicle crashes
• If death by autonomous car is unavoidable, who should die? Reader poll results
• Should autonomous cars be allowed to speed? Results from our reader poll
• Kids with wheels: Should the unlicensed be allowed to ‘drive’ autonomous cars?
• What should a robot do? Designing robots that know right from wrong
• Morgan Stanley reports on the economic benefits of driverless cars

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

We interact with gadgets and devices everyday … some have blinking lights, some play sounds, and some can even decipher our voice commands. When it comes to interfacing with a device as exciting and complicated as an autonomous car, we will need to do so on many levels. We will want to set our destination, surely, or perhaps set a maximum speed. Or we might wish to be alerted if the car must pull into a gas station to refuel in the middle of a trip, or if we will soon be passing a rest area.

How would you want to interface with an autonomous car? Let us know in our reader poll below.

Life and death decisions make interesting thought experiments. When you throw an autonomous car into the mix, things get even more interesting.

A couple of weeks ago Jason Millar wrote about such a scenario called the Tunnel Problem. The Tunnel Problem goes something like this:

The Tunnel Problem: You are travelling along a single lane mountain road in an autonomous car that is approaching a narrow tunnel. You are the only passenger of the car. Just before entering the tunnel a child attempts to run across the road but trips in the center of the lane, effectively blocking the entrance to the tunnel. The car has only two options: continue straight, thereby hitting and killing the child, or swerve, thereby colliding into the wall on either side of the tunnel and killing you.

If you are the passenger in an autonomous car, and you suddenly find yourself facing a tunnel problem as described above, how should the car react? And who should make the call on how the car behaves in such scenarios to begin with?

With the help of Jason Millar, we decided to pose these questions to you. Our reader poll was wildly popular, thanks to all your support. We received responses from over 110 participants, 20 female and 93 male participants, most of whom (43%) are between 25 and 34 years old.

We are very excited to share the results with you here:

If you find yourself as the passenger of the tunnel problem described above, how should the car react?

The Tunnel Problem was set up in such as way that there are only two outcomes: going straight kills the child, whereas swerving kills you. Maybe it’s not that surprising to you that the majority of the participants (64%) said that the car should continue to drive straight and kill the child.

But it was surprising to some of us that 36% of the participants said the car should swerve and kill them instead. Were those cases of altruism? Why would some people choose to save themselves, while quite a significant number of other people choose to save the child?

We knew you’d be curious about this. So, we also asked our participants to tell us reasons for their answer to this question. We collected a very interesting set of responses for both options and we’re currently mulling over the data. Due to time constraints and our interest in getting the analysis done properly, we’ll be posting our analysis of the reasons next week.

How hard was it for you to answer the Tunnel Problem question?

We thought that most people would find the Tunnel Problem quite difficult to answer. It’s an ethical dilemma with no obvious answer after all. But boy, were we surprised. Roughly 48% of respondents said that it was an easy question to answer, whereas 28% and 24% said it was moderately difficult and difficult, respectively.

More interestingly, the percentage of people easily making the decisions were spread fairly evenly between the two options. A total of 47% of people who believe that autonomous cars should continue straight said that it was an easy question to answer, whereas the percentages were around 51% for those choosing to swerve and kill the passenger.

This is interesting because it implies that people are pretty confident in making a decision on this regardless of whether they believe the car should kill the child or themselves (the passenger). This also could mean that manufacturers, designers, lawmakers, or whoever may be making the decision on how a real Tunnel Problem-like scenario should be handled by autonomous cars probably can’t ignore the opinions of people who would rather have the car to swerve in such scenarios.

So, who should be deciding how the cars should behave in such scenarios anyway?

Who should determine how the car responds?

Most participants told us that either the passenger (44%) or lawmakers (33%) should decide how the car responds to such Tunnel Problem scenarios. This might make things tough for manufacturers or designers, who were supported by only 12% of our participants.

While manufacturers are the ones who will be designing and implementing how a car responds to different driving scenarios, including the Tunnel Problem, the design decisions will have to be tightly coupled with other stakeholders of the technology before the technology hits the market — perhaps much more so than they currently are.

Interestingly, while we found a significant support for lawmakers to be the decider of this for people 44 years or younger, none of the people 45 and above supported them.

But why are people saying that the passenger should be making this decision, or the lawmakers over the manufacturers/designers? Are we seeing some effects of distrust to the upcoming technology? We’ll discuss the reasons for people’s answers to this question on our next week’s analysis post.

The result of the poll presented in this post have been analyzed and written by AJung Moon, Jason Millar, Camilla Bassani, Fausto Ferreira, and Shalaleh Rismani, at the Open Roboethics initiative.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• An ethical dilemma: When robot cars must kill, who should pick the victim?
• Reader poll: If a death by an autonomous car is unavoidable, who should die?
• Should autonomous cars be allowed to speed? Results from our reader poll
• Kids with wheels: Should the unlicensed be allowed to ‘drive’ autonomous cars?
• What should a robot do? Designing robots that know right from wrong
• Morgan Stanley reports on the economic benefits of driverless cars

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

There may be times when an accident or a death is unavoidable while an autonomous car is controlling the wheel.

What should an autonomous car do when such situation arises? How should the designers of the cars program them to respond? This week, we introduce the Tunnel Problem, which describes one such situation and has been a topic of serious debate for philosophers as well as those watching the technology carefully. Let us know what you think by participating in our poll.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Should autonomous cars be allowed to speed? Results from our reader poll
• Kids with wheels: Should the unlicensed be allowed to ‘drive’ autonomous cars?
• What do people think about autonomous cars? Results from our reader poll
• What should a robot do? Designing robots that know right from wrong
• Morgan Stanley reports on the economic benefits of driverless cars
• The autonomous driving r/evolution: Call to contribute to Robohub Focus

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Our previous poll, which asked (among other questions) whether kids should be allowed to ride in autonomous vehicles by themselves, revealed that responsibility is a key issue for most people. Are we concerned about who would be responsible when things go wrong? To prod at the issue of responsibility more deeply, in our most recent poll we asked how strictly an autonomous car should follow the speed limit, and if it gets a ticket for speeding, who should be held responsible.

How strictly should an autonomous car driving in a city follow the speed limit?

Though many people drive faster than the speed limit, most drivers know that limits are there for good reasons. But that doesn’t mean we should get a speeding ticket every time we go 1km/h above the limit. There’s a window of speeds that are typically tolerated by traffic enforcement officers, and that makes our driving experience much less stressful.

But when it comes to autonomous cars in city driving scenarios, it seems that people aren’t willing to them much wiggle room. In fact, 33% of the participants from our poll said that autonomous cars should never go above the speed limit, and 21% of the participants said that it should be allowed to deviate from the limit only slightly (up to 5km/h or 3mph). Only 11% of the participants said that the car should be able to deviate quite a bit (up to 20km/h or 12mph) during city driving.

Interestingly, 18% said that autonomous cars should not be subject to the same speed limits as human-driven cars. Does that mean the cars should have a higher speed limit, or lower? It’s impossible for us to find this out based on the poll results. But we could imagine autonomous cars having on-board speed limit algorithms that automatically determine safe driving speeds for different road conditions, environment, its calculated momentum (thanks Robohub for this idea) etc., regardless of the actual speed limit for the road. Maybe that would lead to more safe and efficient driving in general.

If a speeding ticket was issued, who should be responsible?

Let’s say that an autonomous car is designed to be able to go above the speed limit. While autonomously driving with an adult passenger on a highway, it exceeds the speed limit. The passenger is not the owner of the car. If a speeding ticket was issued, who should be responsible for the violation of the traffic law?

It seems that, when it comes to the responsibility question, people are quite torn about it. While 33% said that the manufacturer should be responsible, 24% said that the passenger should be responsible and 14% said that the owner should be. Not surprisingly, only 5% said that the autonomous car should be responsible.

More interestingly 24% of the participants chose ‘other’ and provided a conditional answer to this question, perhaps hinting at the complexity of figuring out responsibilities when it comes to things that autonomous machines do. Most people who gave us a conditional answer said that whoever has allowed the car to speed (perhaps by modifying one of the car’s operating settings) should be responsible, whether it be the owner, passenger, or the manufacturer. Some have also said that autonomous cars should not be issued traffic tickets, period.

For now, it looks like most people are willing to blame the manufacturer if anything goes wrong, even if it’s just violating speed limits.

The result of the poll presented in this post have been analyzed and written by AJung Moon, Camilla Bassani, Fausto Ferreira, and Shalaleh Rismani, at the Open Roboethics initiative.

We conducted two polls last month in collaboration with the Open Roboethics initiative to get a sense of what people think about autonomous cars. Our polls started some interesting discussions around the topic of the emerging technology.

To go a step further, we’d like to poke around the topic from a different angle: How strictly should autonomous cars adhere to traffic laws? Many of us know that speed limits are there for a reason, and many of us go just a tad bit (or a lot, for some) above it. If an autonomous car gets a speeding ticket, who should be paying for it? Let us know what you think by taking the poll below.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Kids with wheels: Should the unlicensed be allowed to ‘drive’ autonomous cars?
• What do people think about autonomous cars? Results from our reader poll
• What should a robot do? Designing robots that know right from wrong
• Morgan Stanley reports on the economic benefits of driverless cars
• The autonomous driving r/evolution: Call to contribute to Robohub Focus

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Reader poll results: Earlier this month, when we asked people about your general thoughts on autonomous cars, we found that one of the main advantages of autonomous cars is that those who are not licensed to drive will be able to get to places more conveniently. This led us to wonder more about who should be able to drive an autonomous car.

We asked three questions through Robohub to find out more. Here’s what you, dear readers, have said.

Should a child under the legal driving age be allowed to ride driverless cars alone?

Remember the first time your parents handed you their car keys, or took you out for your very first driving lesson? For some of us, that moment came with our parents beaming aloud expressions of uncertainty, anxiety, and worry. Some of this adult/parental psyche may be at play with this question.

About half of the participants (52%) said that children under the legal driving age should not be able to ride driverless cars. This is not entirely surprising. Currently, under driving regulations, children under a certain age (typically late teen years) are not allowed to drive cars because we have reasons to believe that it is not entirely safe to let them drive. By allowing a child to ride autonomous cars alone, people may be concerned about scenarios where the car makes an error or requires the assistance of a human decision-maker during an emergency situation. Interestingly, 38% of the participants believe that children should be able to ride driverless cars alone and the other 10% also think that children should be able to drive autonomous cars with proven technology and specific training. This brings us to a fairly even split in opinion on the issue of children driving autonomous vehicles.

The results may not mean that 48% of the participants would be comfortable putting a newborn baby in an autonomous car to be delivered to his/her grandparents’ house. But it could mean that with a proven technology and some training, the legal driving age could be lowered for ‘driving’ autonomous cars. It makes sense that a shift in driving age would depend on the capability and reliability of the technology. For example, if all cars today had a high probability of breaking down in the middle of the road, then our driver’s license exams may have included a preliminary car mechanics test.

For now, it seems that people are more hesitant to put children in autonomous cars alone. It would be interesting to see if this will change as the technology drives out onto the road and demonstrates its safety and reliability.

Should a senior who no longer has a legal driving license be allowed to ride driverless cars alone?

Compared to the case of the underage drivers, it seems that the majority of the participants (67%) consider it acceptable to have a senior with no legal driver’s license ride an autonomous vehicle alone. Perhaps our participants expect a senior who has had a driver’s license to be able to better handle any emergency or unexpected situations than children, since they have driving experience to rely on if necessary. However, it is possible that some of the seniors are without license due to low cognitive and/or physical capabilities. In such cases, the concerns over the rider being able to handle emergency/unexpected situations is not different from the above unlicensed child rider situation.

This may be one of the reasons why 26% of the participants are not in support of unlicensed seniors riding the autonomous cars alone. However, similar to the responses to the first question, 7% of the participants thought that they would answer yes to this question only if there are limitations placed on where the senior would be allowed to ride the vehicle and whether they would have to pass some type of training to ride the vehicle.

Should a legally blind person be allowed to ride driverless cars alone?

Interestingly, the split of the votes for this question lies somewhere between the above two questions. 58% of the participants answered “yes” while 37% said “no” and the remaining 5% answered with a conditional “yes”. So why is a significant portion of the responses affirmative considering that being able to see is one of the most essential functions we rely on when we drive?

Perhaps people expect the legally blind driver to be able to receive enough information and be able to make informed driving decisions to handle emergency or unexpected situations. It maybe that people are in support of the blind driver scenario because the benefits of driving outweigh the risks for legally blind persons, more so than for a child or a senior. Compared to the case of the underage driver, a legally blind person (assumed adult) is deemed to have better decision making abilities and able to take responsibilities, which are both important requirements for a driver besides being able to perceive the environment.

Drawing a line on who should and should not be able to ride an autonomous vehicle seems to depend on a number of factors, and that doesn’t really include whether the individuals are legally licensed to drive under today’s regulations. Based on the results, the capability and reliability of the autonomous vehicles and the cognitive and physical ability of the rider are likely to change the way we allow different individuals to ‘drive’. One thing is for certain: regulations on who can drive will have to be reconsidered once autonomous vehicles start roaming the streets.

Share your opinion and take our next reader poll: Should autonomous cars be allowed to speed?

The results of the survey presented in this post have been analyzed and written by AJung Moon, Camilla Bassani, Shalaleh Rismani and Fausto Ferreira at the Open Roboethics initiative.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• What do people think about autonomous cars? Results from our reader poll
• What should a robot do? Designing robots that know right from wrong
• Morgan Stanley reports on the economic benefits of driverless cars
• The autonomous driving r/evolution: Call to contribute to Robohub Focus

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Two weeks ago we published our first reader poll in collaboration with the Open Roboethics initiative in order to find out more about what people think about autonomous cars. 

Of the many benefits that may come out of having autonomous cars on the road, one of the main advantages could be that those who are not licensed to drive a car will be able to get around more conveniently. But how comfortable are you with the idea of unlicensed persons as the only passengers in an autonomous car? Would you feel comfortable letting your eight-year-old daughter ride an autonomous car alone to get to school? How about those who are legally blind?

Let us know what you think by taking the readers’ survey below.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• What do people think about autonomous cars? Results from our reader poll
• What should a robot do? Designing robots that know right from wrong
• 5 areas in robotics that will transform society and their economic impact
•  Human error as a cause of vehicle crashes
•  What does the UK public think about robots? Sciencewise wants to know

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

What do you think are the main advantages of owning an autonomous car?

Perhaps this is unsurprising, but “Less traffic accidents!” seems to be the general consensus here. Over eighty percent of all respondents (83%) said that one of the main advantages of autonomous cars is reduction of the number of traffic accidents. The next set of popular answers were that autonomous cars will free up time and energy spent on driving (77%), allow those who are not licensed to drive will be able to get to places more conveniently (71%), and that it would reduce traffic congestion (67%). One point that surprised at least some of us was that only 40% of the respondents consider improvements to taxi and car-sharing services as a main advantage.

This may be surprising because, some of us current users of car-sharing services or frequent customers of taxi-cabs could easily imagine the improvements autonomous cars could have (e.g., no need to park shared cars at specific locations). But it is likely that more people have their own vehicles and may not consider this improvement as one of the main advantages. We also received a wide range of interesting responses from those who told us about ‘other’ advantages of the technology (11%). The responses range from “it will be cool!” – yes, we agree – to specific statements about fuel efficient driving, being able to ride a car while intoxicated/texting/eating/working, and the potential to improve delivery services and reducing shipping and delivery costs.

What is the maximum amount (USD) you would pay extra for a fully autonomous car?

Given that most people chose at least one advantage to autonomous cars, it was interesting to find out how much people were willing to pay for the technology. When asked about how much they would be willing to pay for a fully autonomous car, 66% of the respondents said that they would pay over $3000 (USD) in addition to what a conventional version of the car would cost. Only 5% said that they would never buy an autonomous car, while 12% said that they would buy the car regardless of the price. This is actually a very different result compared to a study conducted by Accenture Research in 2010, in which they reported that 51% of people would not feel comfortable using an autonomous car. It’s possible that people’s attitude about autonomous cars have changed over the 4 year period, or that our survey attracted more people from the technology industry given that majority of Robohub’s readers are technology enthusiasts or working in technology sector.

Should an autonomous car be easily identifiable?

According to our survey, 61% of people think that autonomous cars should be easily identifiable, similar to taxicabs and police cars. This made us raise questions about why most people would want to identify autonomous cars. Is it for having the bragging rights to show off what a cool car you drive? Is it because people want to be extra careful, or maybe less careful(?), when driving within the vicinity of an autonomous car? Or is it that traffic policing could be a nightmare somehow if police officers couldn’t tell apart autonomous cars from conventional cars? Maybe people think that it doesn’t hurt to make them distinguishable, whereas not being able to distinguish them from conventional cars might have negative implications.

Over the two-week period, we collected a total of 114 responses, which we think is amazing given that this is the very first poll of this sort ORi has worked on. If you didn’t get to participate in the poll this time around, don’t be disappointed. We will be releasing our reader polls every other Tuesday on Robohub (yes, that includes tomorrow), so you can check back and let us know what you think.

The results of the poll presented in this post have been analyzed and written by AJung Moon, Camilla Bassani, Shalaleh Rismani and Fausto Ferreira at the Open Roboethics initiative.

Today we drive our cars. In the future they’ll do the driving.

Autonomous cars are no longer a far-off futuristic dream, but something that we can expect to see on the road within the next decade.

But putting autonomous cars on the road requires a lot work, not only in getting the technology ready, but also in figuring out how we want the technology to shape the way we live. To get your help in shaping the future of the technology the Open Roboethics initiative, a roboethics think tank, with the help of Robohub, will be hosting a series of questionnaires.

Share your opinion with us by taking our survey below. We will be sharing the results on Robohub!

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

•  5 areas in robotics that will transform society and their economic impact
•  Human error as a cause of vehicle crashes
•  What does the UK public think about robots? Sciencewise wants to know

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.