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 British Academy and brilliantly chaired by the Royal Society’s director of science policy Claire Craig. Here follows my opening statement:

While Asimov’s laws are organised around the moral value of preventing harm to humans, they are not easy to interpret. We need to stop viewing them as an adequate ethical basis for robotic interactions with people, argues Tom Sorell.

In this interview, Dr. Yueh-Hsuan Weng invites Prof. Ronald C. Arkin, Executive Committee Member of IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, to share his insights on roboethics, with a focus on its technical aspects, military and caregiver applications..

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, legal thinkers, philosophers, social scientists, manufacturers and policy makers considered such issues as:

• The social, technological and philosophical questions orbiting AI.
• Proposals to program ethical algorithms with human values to machines.
• The social implications of the applications of AI.

In the wake of the BSI report 8611 on robots and robotic devices, Yueh-Hsuan Weng interviews Prof. Joanna Bryson of the University of Bath about her take on roboethics and regulating the future of human-robot relationships.

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. How should the car be programmed if it encounters an unavoidable accident? Patrick Lin navigates the murky ethics of self-driving cars in this TED-Ed lecture.

We set out to experimentally test our robot with a consequence engine, and ended up building a minimally ethical robot which – remarkably – appears to implement Asimov’s first and third laws of robotics.

Last week the Waterloo-based Clearpath publicly pledged not to develop lethal autonomous weapons in support of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. While the Campaign has garnered significant support since its launch, it has not previously had support from the for-profit robotics sector – making Clearpath’s public statement a noteworthy demonstration of corporate responsibility, particularly given the company’s background in military applications.