In the year of 2009, the number of published roboethics related books was the main indicator for the ‘rise of roboethics’. This year, this positive trend towards discussion of roboethics issues is reflected in robotics conferences such as ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction 2010, and in courses offered to university students.
Dr. Hinman, director of the Values Institute and co-founder of the Center for Ethics in Science and Technology, is offering a course on roboethics this year at the University of San Diego.
In the Fall semester of 2010, Dr. Hinman’s class …

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, also known to us as UAVs, have already been in the centre of roboethics discussion for many years. But now, the discussion has expanded from voices of the academia and the public to the US government.
Brought to my attention by the Robot Ethics facebook group (Roger F. Gay), the following is a direct copy from the US Committee on Oversight and Government Reform website.
They provide links and documents, as well as webcasts of the first and second panel. (Link: Hearing on Rise of the Drones: Unmanned Systems and …

Six ways to build robots that do humans no harm – tech – 18 November 2008 – New Scientist.
I am not sure why this article slipped through my radar. But this article from New Scientist is a somewhat humorous listing of six ways we could build robots that do humans no harm.
It mentions the authors of the book ‘Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong’. Although this article is not a comprehensive summary of the book, it is a fun read for those of you who may have contemplated the …

Safety issues loom as humanoid invasion approaches – tech – 10 March 2010 – New Scientist.
More and more people are asking the question ‘how can we make it safe to hang out with robots in our daily life?’
In the New Scientist article, Chris Melhuish looks at how facial expressions of a humanoid can be used to make the humanoids intentions more transparent to human users, so that we would know what to expect from the robot.

ICDL is the premiere venue for interdisciplinary research that blends
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learning, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The 9th International Conference on Development and Learning will be held on August 18-21, 2010.

Upcoming conference on social robotics: The International Conference on Social Robotics is a conference for scientists, researchers, and practitioners to report and discuss the latest progress of their forefront research and findings in social robotics, as well as interactions with human beings and integration into our society.