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 …

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

Previous post on Interaction Studies journal, and helpful nudges from my friends led me to an article from the journal titled “What is human? – Toward psychological benchmarks in the field of human-robot interaction”. The paper itself is as interesting as the title. The first author of this paper is Peter Kahn, who is introduced in this post…

This paper argues that psychological questions are as important as ontological questions related to human-like robot development. Nine psychological benchmarks to measure success of human-likeness of a robot is introduced: autonomy, imitation, intrinsic moral value, moral accountability, privacy, reciprocity, conventionality, creativity, and authenticity of relation. Argues that there are strong and weak ontological and psychological claims, combination of which result in four different future cases of how humans will perceive/accept robots and what robots will have become.
Here, the authors define ‘psychological benchmark’ as “categories of interaction that capture conceptually fundamental aspects of human life, specified abstractly enough to resist their identity as a mere psychological instrument, but capable of being translated into testable empirical
propositions”. Later, they argue that “in investigating who we are as a species, and who we can become, we need not privilege the biological “platform”.” Also included is an ambitious claim that “we seek to put into play the entirety of human psychology, extending not only into the realms of sociality but also morality.”