According to IEEE Spectrum’s automation blog, three geminoids met in Japan at the ATR laboratory on March 30th. What are geminoids? They are telepresence robots that take the form of an android (human looking robot).
You can probably tell that the people standing are the real humans, and the rest are the geminoids. The geminoids are Geminoid F, Geminoid HI-1, and Geminoid DK, whose originals are the lady on the left (whose identity we don’t know too much about), Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University, and Prof. Henrik Scharfe of Aalborg University, in Denmark respectively.
Prof. …

For those of you who don’t know the Andersons in the roboethics world, please meet them via the video here.

Susan Anderson and Michael Anderson are a philosopher and a computer scientist (yes, they’re a couple) who has been working together to promote ethics using AI approach for years – they’ve been involved in the field of machine ethics which is a broader field than roboethics. Susan Anderson is a professor at the University of Conneticut and Michael Anderson is an associate professor at the University of Hartford.  Just by skimming …

The New Scientist, The Daily Maverick (South Africa) and other media covered a roboethics related story this Friday by introducing Borut Povše and colleagues’ recent work presented at the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. The conference was held last week (October 10-13th, 2010) in Istanbul, Turkey and was a venue where over 900 papers on the topic were presented.
Borut Povše and colleagues’ work are getting a lot of attention because of the nature of the experiment they conducted. What did they do? They did a study where
“a powerful robot …

The New York Times reports that a “Predator drone pilot played down two warnings about the presence of children before military commanders ordered a helicopter attack that killed 23 Afghan civilians…”
The article also brings up issues surrounding the uses of remote controlled Predators. Does it really cloud the remote controller’s judgment? Does the increased distance between the drone and the controller eliminate the element of guilt in making military decisions?
“But in his desire to support the ground forces, General Otto wrote, the pilot “had a strong desire to find weapons,” and this …

Dr. Machiel Van der Loos forwarded me an article on Paro from the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago. Paro is a furry baby seal robot with the potential to impact people emotionally: it has two huge eyes that can stare at you adoringly and it can move its body parts like a real pup. Emotional bonds with artifacts, such as objects, etc, have been discussed for hundreds and thousands of years in literature. The question for today’s discussion is, ‘Would our emotional bonds with Paro lead to a happy ending, or an ethical ending?’

According to the Trendhunter magazine, a Chinese robotics company called Siasun has built a robot that:
… has the ability to spot gas leaks, monitor your health, talk to you when you are alone, communicate with the police, send text messages and take phone calls when you are not at home.
The robot is built for to take on the role of caretakers for the elderly population. To a lot of people, the above mentioned features of the robot hardly seem enough to call the robot a ‘nanny robot’ or a ‘caretaker …

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.

The media was filled with sex robot talk early January of this year. In particular, there’s been heavy media coverage on Roxxxy, a female sex robot developed by the company TrueCompanion.

Everyone knows that sex sells, and the idea of sex with human-like artifacts has been with us since the myths of ancient Greece – ask David Levy or read his book. But just because it sells does not justify the ethical issues surrounding the product.

It’s been a while since my last batch of blog posts, and I’d like to start off a new batch of posts with a little bit of conservatism.
January 15th 1929, about 19 years from today, Martin Luther King Jr. was born. As a son of Baptist minister, and a Baptist minister himself, he argued that
… progress in science and technology has not been equaled by “moral progress” — instead, humanity is suffering from a “moral and spiritual lag.”
He also preached that
“material advancement was meaningless without an accompanying moral structure” …
“The richer we have …