Assistive robotics: research challenges and ethics education initiatives

Assistive robotics is a fast growing field aimed at helping healthcarers in hospitals, rehabilitation centers and nursery homes, as well as empowering people with reduced mobility at home, so that they can autonomously fulfill their daily living activities. The need to function in dynamic human-centered environments poses new research challenges: robotic assistants need to have friendly interfaces, be highly adaptable and customizable, very compliant and intrinsically safe to people, as well as able to handle deformable materials. Besides technical challenges, assistive robotics raises also ethical defies, which have led to the emergence of a new discipline: Roboethics. Several institutions are developing regulations and standards, and many ethics education initiatives include contents on human-robot interaction and human dignity in assistive situations. In this paper, the state of the art in assistive robotics is briefly reviewed, and educational materials from a university course on Ethics in Social Robotics and AI focusing on the assistive context are presented.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Society-in-the-Loop: Programming the Algorithmic Social Contract

Recent rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning have raised many questions about the regulatory and governance mechanisms for autonomous machines. Many commentators, scholars, and policy-makers now call for ensuring that algorithms governing our lives are transparent, fair, and accountable. Here, I propose a conceptual framework for the regulation of AI and algorithmic systems. I argue that we need tools to program, debug and maintain an algorithmic social contract, a pact between various human stakeholders, mediated by machines. To achieve this, we can adapt the concept of human-in-the-loop (HITL) from the fields of modeling and simulation, and interactive machine learning. In particular, I propose an agenda I call society-in-the-loop (SITL), which combines the HITL control paradigm with mechanisms for negotiating the values of various stakeholders affected by AI systems, and monitoring compliance with the agreement. In short, `SITL = HITL + Social Contract.'Comment: (in press), Ethics of Information Technology, 201

Recommender systems and their ethical challenges

This article presents the first, systematic analysis of the ethical challenges posed by recommender systems through a literature review. The article identifies six areas of concern, and maps them onto a proposed taxonomy of different kinds of ethical impact. The analysis uncovers a gap in the literature: currently user-centred approaches do not consider the interests of a variety of other stakeholders—as opposed to just the receivers of a recommendation—in assessing the ethical impacts of a recommender system

Ethics and Uncertainty: In Vitro Fertilization and Risks to Women\u27s Health

Dr. de Melo-Martin examines the risks, uncertainties and public policies surrounding in vitro fertilization and women\u27s health issues

03-11 "Clocks, Creation, and Clarity: Insights on Ethics and Economics from a Feminist Perspective"

This essay discusses the origins, biases, and effects on contemporary discussions of economics and ethics of the unexamined use of the metaphor “an economy is a machine.” The neoliberal view that the self-regulated workings of free markets should be kept free of impediments is based on this metaphor. Many of the critiques of capitalist systems are, as well. The belief that economists simply uncover universal “laws of motion” of economies, however, is shown to be based on a variety of rationalist thinking that—while widely held—is inadequate for explaining lived human experience. Feminist scholarship in philosophy of science and economics has brought to light some of the biases that have supported the mechanistic worldview. By structuring thought and language in dualistic categories such that alternatives to a mechanistic worldview are labeled as “soft,” the mechanistic view maintains some of its power by seeming “masculine” and “tough.” Possible alternatives to the “an economy is a machine” metaphor are discussed in their relation to developments in philosophy, psychology, and the natural sciences. The essay argues that metaphors such as “an economy is a creative process” and “an economy is an organism” are both intellectually defensible as guides to scientific inquiry and provide a richer ground for moral imagination.