The Dawning of the Ethics of Environmental Robots

Environmental scientists and engineers have been exploring research and monitoring applications of robotics, as well as exploring ways of integrating robotics into ecosystems to aid in responses to accelerating environmental, climatic,and biodiversity changes. These emerging applications of robots and other autonomous technologies present novel ethical and practical challenges. Yet, the critical applications of robots for environmental research, engineering, protection and remediation have received next to no attention in the ethics of robotics literature to date. This paper seeks to fill that void, and promote the study of environmental robotics. It provides key resources for further critical examination of the issues environmental robots present by explaining and differentiating the sorts of environmental robotics that exist to date and identifying unique conceptual, ethical, and practical issues they present

The concept of embedded values and the example of internet security

Many current technological devices used in our everyday lives confront us with a host of new ethical issues to be addressed. Facebook, Twitter, or smart phones are all examples of technologies used quite pervasively which call into question culturally significant values like privacy, among others. The embedded values concept presents the compelling idea that engineers, scientists and designers can create technologies which intentionally enhance cultural and societal values while at the same time minimizing threats to other values. Although the embedded values concept (and the resulting design theories that follow) is of great utility, it remains unclear how to utilize this concept in practice. Added to this is the difficulty of utilizing this concept when engaged in fundamental research or experiments rather than in the creation of a commercial product. This paper presents a novel approach for collaboration between an ethicist and a computer engineering PhD researcher working on the Internet Bad Neighborhoods concept for spam filtering. The results proved beneficial in terms of both the utility of the embedded values concept as well as a strengthening of the engineering PhD researcher’s work

Charting the Next Decade for Value Sensitive Design

In the 2010’s it is widely recognized by computer and information scientists, social scientists, designers, and philosophers of technology that the design of information systems is not value neutral [5-8,11]. Rather, such systems are value laden in part because societal values are major factors in shaping systems, and at the same time the design of the technology reinforces, restructures or uproots societal value structures. Of the many theories and methods to design for this phenomenon one continues to gain traction for its systematic and overarching consideration of values in the design process: Value Sensitive Design (VSD) [5-7]. The aim of this multidisciplinary workshop is to bring together scholars and practitioners interested in ways values can be made to bear upon design and to help continue to build a community by sharing experiences, insights, and criticism

Adapting the System to Users Based on Implicit Data: Ethical Risks and Possible Solutions

Symbiotic systems are systems that gather personal data implicitly provided by the user, derive a profile/model of the user from such data and adjust their output/service according to their notion of what would be desirable to the user thus modeled. Because of these three characteristics, symbiotic systems represent a step forward towards facilitated, simplified, user-friendly digital devices, or do they? Here we propose three cases describing realistic applications of symbiotic systems that potentially encapsulate some serious risk to their users. Experts of five different domains (i.e., ethics, security, law, human-computer interaction and psychology) dissect each case to identify the risks to the users and derive some possible minimization strategies. This panel aims at contributing to a beneficial development of symbiotic systems as it can be achieved by increasing users' discernment and awareness of their consequences for society and everyday life

Ethics in data sharing: developing a model for best practice

As an outcome of a seminar on the 'Ethics in Data Sharing', we sketch a model of best practice for sharing data in research. We illustrate this model with two current and timely real-life cases from the context of computer and network security

A Research Agenda for Hybrid Intelligence:Augmenting Human Intellect With Collaborative, Adaptive, Responsible, and Explainable Artificial Intelligence

We define hybrid intelligence (HI) as the combination of human and machine intelligence, augmenting human intellect and capabilities instead of replacing them and achieving goals that were unreachable by either humans or machines. HI is an important new research focus for artificial intelligence, and we set a research agenda for HI by formulating four challenges