roboethics

Does AI pose a threat to society?

Alan Winfield 03 May 2017

Last week I had the pleasure of debating the question "does AI pose a threat to society?" with friends and colleagues Christian List, Maja Pantic and Samantha Payne. The event was organised by the B...

Asimov’s laws of robotics are not the moral guidelines they appear to be

Tom Sorell 29 Mar 2017

Seventy-five years ago, the celebrated science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story called Runaround. Set on Mercury, it features a sophisticated robot nicknamed Speedy that has been or...

Technical challenges in machine ethics

Yueh-Hsuan Weng 08 Feb 2017

Machine ethics offers an alternative solution for artificial intelligence (AI) safety governance. In order to mitigate risks in human-robot interactions, robots will have to comply with humanity’s e...

Artificial intelligence and ethics: Who does the thinking?

Alex Kirkpatrick 27 Jan 2017

On the 15th November 2016, the IEEE’s AI and Ethics Summit posed the question: “Who does the thinking?” In a series of key-note speeches and lively panel discussions, leading technologists, leg...

How do we regulate robo-morality?

Yueh-Hsuan Weng 15 Dec 2016

In April 2016, British Standards Institution (BSI) published the world’s first ethical standard for the design, production, sale, and usage of social robots. “BS 8611: 2016 Robots and robotic devi...

The ethical dilemma of self-driving cars

CIS Blog 30 Dec 2015

Self-driving cars are already cruising the streets today. And while these cars will ultimately be safer and cleaner than their manual counterparts, they can’t completely avoid accidents altogether. ...

Experiments designing an ethical robot

Alan Winfield 30 Sep 2014

In my last post I wrote about our work on robots with internal models: robots with a simulation of themselves and their environment inside themselves. I explained that we have built a robot with a ...

Clearpath’s public stance on Killer Robots sets precedence in corporate responsibility

AJung Moon 20 Aug 2014

Last week the Waterloo-based Clearpath publicly pledged not to develop lethal autonomous weapons, otherwise known as "killer robots". In an open letter to the public, Clearpath's CTO Ryan Gariepy wr...