Whenever I introduce people to roboethics, people can’t help but ask me “Is robotics technology really advanced enough for us to even worry about ethical issues surrounding them?”.

I think this BBC report (forwarded to me via my labmate Tom Huryn) does a great job of connecting what’s out there already, and how roboethics is indeed a relevant topic of discussion today (rather than something sci-fi-esque for a distant future).

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. …

It’s mid-February 2011 already, and the year 2010 is well tucked away in the past.
But February is not too late for a post on 2010, I think.
I worked on this timeline of roboethics events 2010 over the holidays, and have made it accessible for you below.
I could’ve been more detailed about it the events included here, and I could have mentioned more of the key events from the robotics industry as well. But I figured that there’s enough articles on the web about the top 20 robot videos of 2010, …

Is robotics all just a big hype? I would like to say yes, and no. This is a temporary recycle of an older post I wrote last December covering a topic I wanted to discuss at last night’s Cafe Scientifique. How is medical robotics affecting the society? A discussion of cost vs. benefits, how more people are choosing robotic surgeries, and how some are more disappointed afterwards.

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 …

I found a very good coverage on robots and issues involved with the current state of the art  technology.
PBS NewsHour’s correspondent Miles O’Brien reports:

The full transcript of the coverage is available here.

We, the homo-sapiens, constantly seek challenges and wow the world. Yuna Kim’s perfect figure skating performance at the Vancouver Winter Olympics  (2010) would be my favorite example of this, but then again, we met the challenge of sending men to the Moon, and also fly thousands of people (who don’t have wings hidden in their backs) across the oceans everyday. But it seems to me that we’re increasingly competing with machines these days, and somehow proving that perfectness achieved by machines aren’t really perfect enough in real life – because humans can do …

I am becoming quite fond of RSA animations, and they are becoming more of my idea tinkering entertainment sources during dinner. If any of the roboethicists out there are a fan of either TED videos or RSA animations, please do watch the talk by Jeremy Rifkin.
Starting with the story of mirror neuron discovery, Jeremy Rifkin talks about how as empathic beings we can build an empathic civilisation at a global level and can really build a better world.
One of the issues of social robots is the unknown long-term social effects …

Yes, it’s the summer.
The beautiful weather in Vancouver for the past couple of months really hasn’t been very helpful keeping me posting for the blog.
But with the notion of that Summer should be filled with lots of fun, I’d like to share some robot-filled entertainment with you. Hardly a headline material, I agree. But the epic-ness of the music video you’re about to see may to justice to that.
So here is Dan Mangan, a local Canadian artist, with a song called Robots.

Reporter Amy Harmond interviews Bina48, a robot developed by David Hanson.
Follow the link below to watch the video interview.
Making Friends With a Robot Named Bina48