Previous post on Interaction Studies journal, and helpful nudges from my friends led me to an article from the journal titled “What is human? – Toward psychological benchmarks in the field of human-robot interaction”. The paper itself is as interesting as the title. The first author of this paper is Peter Kahn, who is introduced in this post…

This paper argues that psychological questions are as important as ontological questions related to human-like robot development. Nine psychological benchmarks to measure success of human-likeness of a robot is introduced: autonomy, imitation, intrinsic moral value, moral accountability, privacy, reciprocity, conventionality, creativity, and authenticity of relation. Argues that there are strong and weak ontological and psychological claims, combination of which result in four different future cases of how humans will perceive/accept robots and what robots will have become.
Here, the authors define ‘psychological benchmark’ as “categories of interaction that capture conceptually fundamental aspects of human life, specified abstractly enough to resist their identity as a mere psychological instrument, but capable of being translated into testable empirical
propositions”. Later, they argue that “in investigating who we are as a species, and who we can become, we need not privilege the biological “platform”.” Also included is an ambitious claim that “we seek to put into play the entirety of human psychology, extending not only into the realms of sociality but also morality.”

Only about three weeks ago, one of my friends from the University of Waterloo was attending the UVS(Unmanned Vehicles Systems) Canada Conference in Victoria, BC.
When he paid a visit to Vancouver and met up with me, I was surprised to hear from him that many people showed concerns for ethics of the technology during discussion sessions. United States has Dr. Ronald Arkin and others who are very active in the field, but I am not too aware of any ethicist/engineers specializing in ethics of military technologies (including UVS).
But the link …

Title: Ethics and Robotics
Author: Rafael Capurro and Michael Nagenborg
Subject:Philosophy
Publisher: IOS Press
Published Date: August 15, 2009
Link: Amazon
“Ethics and robotics are two academic disciplines, one dealing with the moral norms and values underlying implicitly or explicitly human behavior and the other aiming at the production of artificial agents, mostly as physical devices, with some degree of autonomy based on rules and programmes set up by their creators. Robotics is also one of the research fields where the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science is currently taking place with large societal …

Title: Killer Robots
Author: Armin Krishnan
Subject: Military
Publisher: Ashgate
Published Date: July 28, 2009
Link: Amazon
* eBook also available from Amazon.

Currently there’s a roboethics related conference called ‘ICT: that makes the difference‘ being held in Brussels, Belgium.
Dr. Gianmarco Veruggio is the keynote lecturer for tomorrow’s (Tuesday Nov. 23rd 2009) session at the conference titled “Robotics and convergence of the real and the virtual“. His lecture is called “Roboethics: Social and Ethical Implications of Robotics”.

I wish I was there to listen to some of the talks, but sadly I’ll have to wait until papers/presentations become available on the web.
Presenters for the session include Atta Badii and Daniel Thiemert from the University of …

In response to the recent ‘A Perfect (Robotic) Woman‘ post, my good friend Mike sent me a couple of related articles that poses more questions/concerns regarding the robotic girlfriend/wife/companion issue.
The first article tells more than just stories of Nisan and Nemutan (a stuffed pillowcase with 2D female character printed on it) in Japan. One of the most interesting quotes from the article for me was “If, as some researchers suggest, romantic love can be broken down into electrical impulses in the brain, then why not train the mind to simulate those …

When David Levy published his book, Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, he was probably expecting someone like Etienne Fresse and Yoichi Yamato to be inspired and to start something like what they presented on June 11th of this year.
Fresse and Yamato are creator of Lisa, built to be the companion robot for numerous single men looking for a companion.
It is surprising how much female android has developed throughout the years.
There’s AKIBA, and Aiko.
Aiko’s coverage on CNN is actually shows interesting ethics perspective of the robot, …

Another newly discovered journal!

There are three special issues from this journal that might be of interest to you: 1.Psychological Benchmarks of Human-Robot Interaction(2007), 2. Human and Robot Interactive Communication(2008), 3. Robots in the Wile: Exploring human-robot interaction in naturalistic environments(2009)

Some interesting titles from the journal: “What is a Human? Toward psychological benchmarks in the field of human–robot interaction”, “Nonverbal intimacy as a benchmark for human–robot interaction”, and “The influence of robot personality on perceived and preferred level of user control”

There’s nothing like discovering an entire volume of a journal that covers your topic of interest – especially on early Monday mornings. First, there’s joy similar to that of treasure hunters finding a box of treasure. Then, the reality of your limited reading speed and lack of reading time strikes you and takes away a big chunk of the joy.
IRIE, the International Review of Information Ethics, was one such journal for me this morning. It had covered the topic of ethics in robotics in 2006, where the following thirteen papers …