110,625 research outputs found
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
Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Demarcations
In this paper we present a set of key demarcations, particularly important
when discussing ethical and societal issues of current AI research and
applications. Properly distinguishing issues and concerns related to Artificial
General Intelligence and weak AI, between symbolic and connectionist AI, AI
methods, data and applications are prerequisites for an informed debate. Such
demarcations would not only facilitate much-needed discussions on ethics on
current AI technologies and research. In addition sufficiently establishing
such demarcations would also enhance knowledge-sharing and support rigor in
interdisciplinary research between technical and social sciences.Comment: Proceedings of the Norwegian AI Symposium 2019 (NAIS 2019),
Trondheim, Norwa
Past Visions of Artificial Futures: One Hundred and Fifty Years under the Spectre of Evolving Machines
The influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALife)
technologies upon society, and their potential to fundamentally shape the
future evolution of humankind, are topics very much at the forefront of current
scientific, governmental and public debate. While these might seem like very
modern concerns, they have a long history that is often disregarded in
contemporary discourse. Insofar as current debates do acknowledge the history
of these ideas, they rarely look back further than the origin of the modern
digital computer age in the 1940s-50s. In this paper we explore the earlier
history of these concepts. We focus in particular on the idea of
self-reproducing and evolving machines, and potential implications for our own
species. We show that discussion of these topics arose in the 1860s, within a
decade of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species, and attracted
increasing interest from scientists, novelists and the general public in the
early 1900s. After introducing the relevant work from this period, we
categorise the various visions presented by these authors of the future
implications of evolving machines for humanity. We suggest that current debates
on the co-evolution of society and technology can be enriched by a proper
appreciation of the long history of the ideas involved.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2018
(ALIFE 2018), MIT Pres
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