And the Robot Asked "What do you say I am?" Can Artificial Intelligence Help Theologians and Scientists Understand Free Moral Agency?

Concepts of human beings as free and morally responsible agents are shared culturally by scientists and Christian theologians. Accomiplishments of the "artificial intelligence" (AI) branch of computer science now suggest the possibility of an advanced robot mimicking behaviors associated with free and morally responsible agency. The author analyzes some specific features theology has expected of such agency, inquiring whether appropriate AI resources are available for incorporating the features in robots. Waiving questions of whether such extraordinary robots will be constructed, the analysis indicates that they could be, furnishing useful new scientific resources for understanding moral agency

Robots in Care and Everyday Life

This open access book presents detailed findings about the ethical, legal, and social acceptance of robots in the German and European context. The key resource is the Bremen AI Delphi survey of scientists and politicians and a related population survey. The focus is on trust in robotic assistance, human willingness to use this assistance, and the expected personal well-being in human-robot interaction. Using recent data from Eurostat, the European Social Survey, and the Eurobarometer survey, the analysis is extended to Germany and the EU. The acceptance of robots in care and everyday life is viewed against their acceptance in other contexts of life and the scientific research. The book reports on how the probability of five complex future scenarios is evaluated by experts and politicians. These scenarios cover a broad range of topics, including the worst-case scenario of cutthroat competition for jobs, the wealth promise of AI, communication in human-robot interaction, robotic assistance, and ethical and legal conflicts. International economic competition alone will ensure that countries invest sustainably in the future technologies of AI and robots. But will these technologies also be accepted by the population? The book raises the core issue of how governments can gain the needed social, ethical, and user acceptance of AI and robots in everyday life. This highly topical book is of interest to researchers, professionals and policy makers working on various aspects of human-robot interaction. This is an open access book

Towards long-term social child-robot interaction: using multi-activity switching to engage young users

Social robots have the potential to provide support in a number of practical domains, such as learning and behaviour change. This potential is particularly relevant for children, who have proven receptive to interactions with social robots. To reach learning and therapeutic goals, a number of issues need to be investigated, notably the design of an effective child-robot interaction (cHRI) to ensure the child remains engaged in the relationship and that educational goals are met. Typically, current cHRI research experiments focus on a single type of interaction activity (e.g. a game). However, these can suffer from a lack of adaptation to the child, or from an increasingly repetitive nature of the activity and interaction. In this paper, we motivate and propose a practicable solution to this issue: an adaptive robot able to switch between multiple activities within single interactions. We describe a system that embodies this idea, and present a case study in which diabetic children collaboratively learn with the robot about various aspects of managing their condition. We demonstrate the ability of our system to induce a varied interaction and show the potential of this approach both as an educational tool and as a research method for long-term cHRI

Robots in Care and Everyday Life

This open access book presents detailed findings about the ethical, legal, and social acceptance of robots in the German and European context. The key resource is the Bremen AI Delphi survey of scientists and politicians and a related population survey. The focus is on trust in robotic assistance, human willingness to use this assistance, and the expected personal well-being in human-robot interaction. Using recent data from Eurostat, the European Social Survey, and the Eurobarometer survey, the analysis is extended to Germany and the EU. The acceptance of robots in care and everyday life is viewed against their acceptance in other contexts of life and the scientific research. The book reports on how the probability of five complex future scenarios is evaluated by experts and politicians. These scenarios cover a broad range of topics, including the worst-case scenario of cutthroat competition for jobs, the wealth promise of AI, communication in human-robot interaction, robotic assistance, and ethical and legal conflicts. International economic competition alone will ensure that countries invest sustainably in the future technologies of AI and robots. But will these technologies also be accepted by the population? The book raises the core issue of how governments can gain the needed social, ethical, and user acceptance of AI and robots in everyday life. This highly topical book is of interest to researchers, professionals and policy makers working on various aspects of human-robot interaction. This is an open access book

Artificial Identity: Representations of Robots and Cyborgs in Contemporary Anglo-American Science Fiction Films

The ‘human condition’ has traditionally been an area of study addressed primarily by philosophers concerned with the mind/body problem, rather than studied as a neuroscientific conundrum. However, contemporary developments in science and technology that afford us a greater knowledge of the human brain have resulted in an increased scientific focus on consciousness, emotion and personhood. This thesis argues that such explorations into consciousness and emotion as prerequisites of ‘artificial identity’ have entered the domain of contemporary cinema through the representations of robots and cyborgs. Despite the capacity for transhumanist practice and the creation of artificially intelligent automata that these developments have made possible, blurring the line between organic human and mechanical robots, it remains common for no distinctions to be made between the terms ‘human’ and ‘person’, which are used interchangeably to describe a member of the human race. Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, though, has proposed a series of criteria for personhood that challenge the assumption that only humans can be considered persons. The application of his criteria to a series of key texts that highlight the relationships between humans and representations of automata - I, Robot (2004, Dir. Alex Proyas), Terminator Salvation (2009, Dir. McG) and Bicentennial Man (1999, Dir. Chris Columbus) – is central to this thesis. It explores the extent to which the representations of robots and cyborgs can be considered persons within utopian and dystopian narratives that have, at their core, a view of artificial identity as desirable or as nightmare. In conjunction with Dennett, the theories of neurologist and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio are applied, which explore both the biological means by which emotional (rather than solely physical) feelings are generated in humans, and the capacity of humans to simulate emotion. As Damasio argues that many of the central operations of the human central nervous and visceral systems are reducible to fundamental physics, the suggestion is that robots, too, could also ‘experience’ consciousness and emotion, being as they are very simplistic versions of humans. As such, the application of these theories suggests that the representations of robots and cyborgs in the key texts could be considered persons

Quantitative analysis of backchannels uttered by an interviewer during neuropsychological tests

International audienceThis paper examines in detail the backchannels uttered by a French professional interviewer during a neuropsychological test of verbal memories. These backchannels are short utterances such as oui, d'accord, uhm, etc. They are mainly produced here to encourage subjects to retrieve a set of words after their controlled encoding. We show that the choice of lexical items, their production rates and their associated prosodic contours are influenced by the subject performance and conditioned by the protocol

AI ethics and higher education : good practice and guidance for educators, learners, and institutions

Artificial intelligence (AI) is exerting unprecedented pressure on the global higher educational landscape in transforming recruitment processes, subverting traditional pedagogy, and creating new research and institutional opportunities. These technologies require contextual and global ethical analysis so that they may be developed and deployed in higher education in just and responsible ways. To-date, these efforts have been largely focused on small parts of the educational environments leaving most of the world out of an essential contribution. This volume acts as a corrective to this and contributes to the building of competencies in ethics education and to broader, global debates about how AI will transform various facets of our lives, not the least of which is higher education