A new book is being written by Dominique Mainon, who plans to discuss transhumanism, evolution of robots, cyborgs, and androids in cinema under the context of love/sex.
She is introduced by Dr. J at IEET as following:
Dominique Mainon (dominiquemainon.com), an author, screenwriter, and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. She is author of, among others, Cinema of Obsession: Erotic Fixation and Love Gone Wrong in the Movies, Femme Fatale: Cinema’s Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies, and The Modern Amazons: Warrior Women On-Screen.
Listen to Dr. J’s interview with her at IEET. I would actually suggest you start …

The Singularity Hub has released their second annual roundup of the best robots of the year. It’s always so convenient to have a summary of what was developed throughout the year in one webpage.
Go to the Singularity Hub to watch and read about the best robots of 2009:
A Review Of The Best Robots of 2009 | Singularity Hub.

NBC Coverage on Largest Drone Attack

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones – Wall Street Journal

On December 17th (Tuesday last week), our sister blog Moral Machines (a really informative and active blog run by the authors of the book Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong) made two posts about US drones.
One was the news about the largest drone attack by the US military (the first embed above), which happened that day – and I quote Moral Machines:
NBC is reporting that more than …

Peter Singer, a bioethicist at Princeton University, and Agata Sagan, a Warsaw based ethicist [REF: Accelerating Future], discussed roboethics at the Project Syndicate website.
I wouldn’t say the contents of the article is terribly new, but still worth blogging about – for those Peter Singer readers.
Access Full Article Here: Project Syndicate-Rights for Robots?.
For the moment, a more realistic concern is not that robots will harm us, but that we will harm them. At present, robots are mere items of property. But what if they become sufficiently complex to have …

Created by Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Robovie II will be helping out elderly customers at Kyoto, Japan until March 2010. There’s definitely a reason why everyone wants to be in Japan for robotics research.
For details, read the post on Artificial Intelligence and Robots.

Future Weapons from the Discovery channel did an intro on Little Bird UAV, built by Boeing.
To suite the target audience the coverage is filled with masculinity. There’s no mention of ethical concerns, and shows the advantages of the UAV technology. But a good video that shows what current UAV technology can offer.

I found a presentation by Mr. John S. Canning, Chief Engineer of G80 Division Naval Surface Warfare Centre, titled “A Concept of Operations for Armed Autonomous Systems”. Armin Krishnan commented on some of the John Canning’s thoughts during his interview with Institute of Religion and Peace (access Krishnan interview post).
In the presentation he goes through:

Legal review of weapons
Rules of Engagement
Discriminate use of force
Issues of target discrimination
A proposed concept of operations for autonomous use of weapons
Valid targets from a legal standpoint
Target subset for autonomous systems
Legal precedence

He concludes his presentation with the …

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 …

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, …

BBC news coverage on how Japanese religion (Shintoism) and culture (eg. manga) plays a role in the country’s robotics development.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | Robots that model clothes and clean windows.