Robot Ethics

Next fall semester (2016), I'll be leading a 1-credit seminar on robot ethics.

Here's the course description:

Social robots are increasingly part of our lives. Tico helps teachers in schools. Savione delivers items to hotel guests. Pepper is an emotional companion. Buddy monitors home appliances and interacts with children. Jibo is a personal assistant. Developing these robots requires more than engineering know-how. It also requires developing ethical norms for their behavior. This course explores what these norms might be, how we might make them amenable to computer coding, and how we might resolve disagreements about their content. We'll discuss top-down approaches, which derive robot ethics from moral theory; bottom-up approaches, which use machine learning techniques to have robots construct norms using feedback from interactions; and middle-out approaches, which combine theory with social scientific experimentation.