What Does It Mean for a Robot to Be Respectful?

Funding Information: The major work on this article was funded by Kone Foundation in 2020 through the project Towards Responsible Artificial Intelligence (University of Helsinki, Finland). The article was completed at the University of Twente. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Philosophy Documentation Center. All rights reserved.Intelligent systems are increasingly incorporated into relationships that had, until recently, been reserved solely for humans, and are delegated the role of a partner, which, if human, would presuppose a system of normatively regulated interactivity. This includes expectations of reciprocity and certain attitudes/actions towards human actors, such as respect. Even though a robot cannot respect, I argue that it can be respectful. A robot can be attributed respectfulness (in the direct sense) iff its interactions with persons reflect the respectful attitude of the humans involved in its design and operation. Robot respectfulness is a compound of (a) robotic actions governed by principles that (b) reflect the attitude of respect for persons by humans involved in its design, implementation, and professional use. I define respect for persons as a commitment to core values that make someone a person (i.e., intellect, rationality of reactive attitudes, autonomy, personal integrity, and trust in expertise).Peer reviewe

Methodology and themes of human-robot interaction: a growing research field

Original article can be found at: http://www.intechweb.org/journal.php?id=3 Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Users are free to read, print, download and use the content or part of it so long as the original author(s) and source are correctly credited.This article discusses challenges of Human-Robot Interaction, which is a highly inter- and multidisciplinary area. Themes that are important in current research in this lively and growing field are identified and selected work relevant to these themes is discussed.Peer reviewe

Discourse in Development: Viewing the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights through the Post-Colonial Lens

This article uses post-colonial theory to examine the cluster of international human rights known as economic, social and cultural rights. The article surveys the jurisprudence of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, making it relevant for scholars of international human rights as well as post-colonial theory. Traditionally, international human rights divide into two branches: 1) civil and political rights, and 2) economic, social and cultural rights (ESCRs). ESCRs were virtually ignored during the cold war era, but they now receive expanded attention at the international and regional levels. The creation of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the mid-1980s began this process. The Committee has been highly influential in ESCR norm development. Post-colonialism is a branch of critical theory aimed at exposing the exploitative and paternalistic legacy of the international community's relationship to former colonies in the developing world. There is a small body of post-colonial theory literature examining international human rights, but it focuses on civil and political rights. The author, a specialist in ESCRs, seeks to engage theorists with another branch of human rights. ESCRs should be of interest to post-colonial theorists because these rights implicate economic national sovereignty, most importantly social spending. Developing country social spending has been uniquely politicized in post-colonial north-south relations through controversies over structural adjustment and trade liberalization. Post-colonial theorists should acknowledge that emerging ESCR jurisprudence and Committee procedures are responsive to north-south concerns on many levels. For example, the Committee's Concluding Observations concentrate on recommendations rather than on "violations." This modality permits sensitivity to differential southern budgetary realities while facilitating critique of wealthy egalitarian countries. A second example is that the Committee is progressive, within its limited means, about facilitating participation by "subaltern" southern groups. An important challenge post-colonial theory presents to the emerging ESCR regime is the Committee's record on encouraging southern governments to protect social welfare spending from external pressure. What does it mean for a country to cut social spending by IMF mandate, incur external debt for large-scale development projects through World Bank, and lower trade barriers pursuant to the WTO, only to be condemned by a UN human rights body for any resulting intensification of hunger, ill health and population displacement? The Committee could adjust its processes to better address this conundrum by routinely pursuing and analyzing information about the status of international negotiations.

Multiwavelength study of the nuclei of a volume-limited sample of galaxies I: X-ray observations

We discuss ROSAT HRI X-ray observations of 33 very nearby galaxies, sensitive to X-ray sources down to a luminosity of approximately 10^38 erg/s. The galaxies are selected from a complete, volume limited sample of 46 galaxies with d<7 Mpc for which we have extensive multi-wavelength data. For an almost complete sub-sample with M_B<-14 (29/31 objects) we have HRI images. Contour maps and source lists are presented within the central region of each galaxy, together with nuclear upper limits where no nuclear source was detected. Nuclear X-ray sources are found to be very common, occurring in ~35% of the sample. Nuclear X-ray luminosity is statistically connected to host galaxy luminosity - there is not a tight correlation, but the probability of a nuclear source being detected increases strongly with galaxy luminosity and the distribution of nuclear luminosities seems to show an upper envelope that is roughly proportional to galaxy luminosity. While these sources do seem to be a genuinely nuclear phenomenon rather than nuclear examples of the general X-ray source population, it is far from obvious that they are miniature Seyfert nuclei. The more luminous nuclei are very often spatially extended, and HII region nuclei are detected just as often as LINERs. Finally, we also note the presence of fairly common super-luminous X-ray sources in the off-nuclear population - out of 29 galaxies we find 9 sources with a luminosity larger than 10^39 erg/s. These show no particular preference for more luminous galaxies. One is already known to be a multiple SNR system, but most have no obvious optical counterpart and their nature remains a mystery.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 26 pages, 47 figures (figures 1-29,31 and 38 as separate, low resolution files; full resolution files are available at http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~plt

Regional variations in the diffusion of triggered seismicity

[1] We determine the spatiotemporal characteristics of interearthquake triggering in the International Seismological Centre catalogue on regional and global scales. We pose a null hypothesis of spatially clustered, temporally random seismicity, and determine a residual pair correlation function for triggered events against this background. We compare results from the eastern Mediterranean, 25 Flinn-Engdahl seismic regions, and the global data set. The null hypothesis cannot be rejected for distances greater than 150 km, providing an upper limit to triggering distances that can be distinguished from temporally uncorrelated seismicity in the stacked data at present. Correlation lengths L andmean distances between triggered events hri are on the order of 10–50 km, but can be as high as 100 km in subduction zones. These values are not strongly affected by magnitude threshold, but are comparable to seismogenic thicknesses, implying a strong thermal control on correlation lengths. The temporal evolution of L and hri is well fitted by a power law, with an exponent H 0.1 ± 0.05. This is much lower than the value H = 0.5 expected for Gaussian diffusion in a homogenous medium. We observe clear regional variations in L, hri and H that appear to depend on tectonic setting. A detectable transition to a more rapid diffusion regime occurs in some cases at times greater than 100–200 days, possibly due to viscoelastic processes in the ductile lower crust

An empirical framework for human-robot proxemics

The work described in this paper was conducted within the EU Integrated Projects COGNIRON ("The Cognitive Robot Companion") and LIREC (LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions) and was funded by the European Commission under contract numbers FP6- 002020 and FP7-215554.An empirical framework for Human-Robot (HR) proxemics is proposed which shows how the measurement and control of interpersonal distances between a human and a robot can be potentially used by the robot to interpret, predict and manipulate proxemic behaviour for Human-Robot Interactions (HRIs). The proxemic framework provides for incorporation of inter-factor effects, and can be extended to incorporate new factors, updated values and results. The framework is critically discussed and future work proposed

HSP: A Tool for Heat Stress Prevention for Farm Workers

We present the initial development of an integrated application for heat stress and heat related illness prevention in farm workers. In developing the application we have follow the OSHA guidelines and an extended project includes the social, cultural and economic factors of farm workers. Even though, our development focus is on workers in the California fields, we believe our project will be useful in multiple situations where individuals are exposed to extreme heat working conditions. This paper describes the motivation for our development, the overall approach we are following, and the first version of our application

Robot Mindreading and the Problem of Trust

This paper raises three questions regarding the attribution of beliefs, desires, and intentions to robots. The first one is whether humans in fact engage in robot mindreading. If they do, this raises a second question: does robot mindreading foster trust towards robots? Both of these questions are empirical, and I show that the available evidence is insufficient to answer them. Now, if we assume that the answer to both questions is affirmative, a third and more important question arises: should developers and engineers promote robot mindreading in view of their stated goal of enhancing transparency? My worry here is that by attempting to make robots more mind-readable, they are abandoning the project of understanding automatic decision processes. Features that enhance mind-readability are prone to make the factors that determine automatic decisions even more opaque than they already are. And current strategies to eliminate opacity do not enhance mind-readability. The last part of the paper discusses different ways to analyze this apparent trade-off and suggests that a possible solution must adopt tolerable degrees of opacity that depend on pragmatic factors connected to the level of trust required for the intended uses of the robot