How ethical robots process information, communicate and act
2015 (English)In: 1st TRANSOR Workshop: Methodological Problems of Social Robotics, 2015Conference paper, Oral presentation only (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Robots can be of great help to obtain optimal solutions to problems in situations where humans have difficulties to perceive and process information, or make decisions and implement actions because of the quantity, variation and complexity of information.
However, if they do not act in accordance to our ethical values they will not be used or will cause harm. Classical philosophical theory and psychological research on problem solving and decision making gives us a concrete definition of ethics and opens up the way for the construction of robots that can support handling of moral problems. Linguistic research focusing on language use as realization of meaning during the communication between humans and robots gives us the tools for investigating how particular linguistic features such as words and grammar may be related to ethical thinking.
In such research work we can focus on three different kinds of robots: The first one is already programmed to act in certain ways, and the focus is on designers using ethical tools to identify moral problems and formulate solutions. The second is an integrated system which is also pre-programmed but also contains an ethical tool to gather information, to present it to the operators and to communicate with them. The third is trained autonomous systems in which we will implement automatic judgment. Such research will help us to clarify theoretical issues, to formulate working methods, and to develop technical solutions that will support ethical decision making of automated IT systems.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2015.
Keywords [en]
autonomous systems, robots, language, communication, ethics, moral
National Category
Human Computer Interaction Computer Vision and Robotics (Autonomous Systems) Language Technology (Computational Linguistics) Ethics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-253113OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-253113DiVA, id: diva2:812890
Conference
1st TRANSOR Workshop: Methodological Problems of Social Robotics, Aarhus University, Denmark, January 28–30, 2015
Projects
ETHCOMPCEST2015-05-202015-05-202018-01-11