Motivation

Robotics education is remarkably multidisciplinary.  We already expose our students to deep content in computer science, artificial intelligence, mechanical engineering, electric engineering, human factors and human-computer interaction.  This is as it should be, as robotics draws upon all of these disciplines and others to design entire perception, cognition and actuation systems. 

Not only is robotics inherently a multi-discipline study, but its increasing sophistication is rapidly pushing research and commercial robotics activities out of the regime of warehouses and manufacturing facilities and into social interactions with all manner of people in society.  Yet the study of sociology and robotics is missing from most robotics coursework.

Certainly, today’s robotics students will face real social robot dilemmas during their technical careers.  I already see students who want to sit down and talk about military robotics, jobs loss issues stemming from automation, telepresence and numerous other topics fall well outside the antiseptic space of pure science and technology know-how. 

We need to equip our students to be able to grapple with and communicate eloquently about these boundary issues in robotics- the trend lines make this only more important every year.  The material in Ethics and Robotics is intended specifically to empower students to be able to conduct two important meta-level activities on and about the robotics field.  First, students need access to formal ethical frameworks that they can use to study and evaluate ethical consequence in robotics well enough to make their own well-informed decisions.  Second, students need to understand the downstream impact of media-making well enough to help the field as a whole communicate with the public authentically and effectively about robotics and its ramifications on society.  So in short we wish to make students of robotics smart decision-makers and great communicators.

To this end, Ethics and Robotics introduces formal ethical frameworks and shows students how to apply each framework to robot-specific inquiry.  We show students how to evaluate and make sense of media communication strategies regarding technology and its impact on society.  Bringing these two skills together, then we expose students to current events and future think regarding robotics, as a focus for both ethical analysis and rhetorical evaluation.

This on-line course resource is designed so that anything from a new single-day session on ethics and robotics to a full-semester exploration of the subject can make use of the content provided in the site.  My hope is that this ready material provides enough extra motivation for instructors to begin including ethics and robotics in their introductory and seminar coursework.  With luck the future crop of roboticists will make ever more ethical decisions and will represent our field to the public with increasingly transparent and balanced viewpoints.