Hi every one, I’m back from exams and back on blogging.
I will be posting some old materials on roboethics for the next few days. Roboethics is a very new field and I think it’d be good to have a collection of links to the pioneering works in this field – for all the roboethics enthusiasts and researchers out there.
This post is about Syrobo, an initiative from the French Consumer Robotics Syndicate.
I learned about it from Dr. Gianmarco Veruggio’s presentation at the ICRA’09, Kobe, Japan.
Members involved are companies such as Gostai, Aldebaran …

The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas – Magazine – NYTimes.com
One of the ideas introduced in The 9th Annual Year in Ideas by the The Times Magazine is military roboethics.
Titled “Guilty Robots”, the magazine mentions Ronald Arkin’s recent work in military robotics and ethical architecture, as well as a new direction he is taking: modeling guilt.
After considering several moral emotions like remorse, compassion and shame, Arkin decided to focus on modeling guilt because it can be used to condemn specific behavior and generate constructive change. While fighting, his robots assess battlefield …

Legal side of this Roboethics Info Databse is about to expand – thansk to M. Ryan Calo, a residential fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet & Society, who is interested in roboethics issues from the perspective of law.
Some of his work from Stanford is introduced in different corners of the web (“Scientists, laywers ponder effects of home robots”, The Salt Lake Tribune; “Robots, Law and Society”, Kenneth Anderson, The Volokh Conspiracy;). More on him will be posted later (after my final exams!).
Meanwhile, here’s a Yahoo News articles from December …

IEET conducted a poll asking “If you had a personal robot that could do only one thing, which ability would you prefer it to have?” Is the question itself unethical?”. Result is shown below(source, IEET).

Little blurb about the poll itself can be found from the original IEET article: Sex Slaves, Polls, and Ethics.

The use of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) in war has been one of the most controversial topics in the field of Roboethics. While the talk of sex robot still remains futuristic, military robotics is definitely considered to be today’s topic.
This year alone, I saw at least three new books published on this topic: (in order of publication date) Peter Singer’s Wired for War; Ronald Arkin’s Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots; and Armin Krishnan’s Killer Robots.
And it was great to read today’s New York Times article that covers this very …

There’s an interesting discussion from 2007 on the question posted at docinthemachine.com “Is Technology Good, Evil, or Neutral?”. The author argues that technology is neutral.
For those of you interested in answering this question, some technoethicists (and myself) would undoubtedly suggest reading books by Jacques Ellul to be convinced of the term technological ambivalence – meaning technology is inherently ambivalent (good and bad/evil).
Access the discussion post here: Is Technology Good, Evil, or Neutral?.

Another interesting interview from Institute for Religion and Peace (Military Diocese of the Republic of Austria) was with Armin Krishnan, a visiting assistant professor for Security Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. His recent book “Killer Robots” (2009) talks about ethics of autonomous weapons, and details of the book can be found here.

For those who would prefer a (somewhat) brief summary of Armin Krishnan’s findings presented in the book “Killer Robots”, below is what I got out it.
And of course, for those who are interested in reading …

For those of you who use Facebook, there is a roboethics Facebook group called ‘roboethics’, created by Dr. Gianmarco Veruggio. It hasn’t been too active, partially due to the fact that some of the posts are in Italian and some are in English. But there’s 67 members who joined the group, and I found out about the following roboethics related interviewsfrom it – and later from Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen’s blog, Moral Machines.
Both interviews are from Institute for Religion and Peace (Military Diocese of the Republic of Austria).
Gianmarco Veruggio(CNR-IEIIT …

This is a heads-up on ICRA(International Conference of Robotics and Automation) 2010′s robot manipulation challenge. Click here for the full IEEE article regarding the ICRA challenge.

Matei Ciocarlie, a researcher at Willow Garage is helping to organize the event, and here’s a picture from IEEE of what our dishwashers will start interacting with in the future.

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 …