What is Open Roboethics?

Open Roboethics is a vision for the field of roboethics presented by AJung Moon at the We Robot 2012 conference on Apr. 22nd, 2012:

AJung Moon, Ergun Calisgan, Fiorella Operto, Gianmarco Veruggio, and H.F. Machiel Van der Loos on “Open Roboethics: Establishing an Online Community for Accelerated Policy and Design Change”

(Click here for video recording of the presentation: http://tinyurl.com/openroboethics)

Many of today’s ethical, legal, and social (ELS) issues pertaining robotics technology are not specific to a particular country, culture, or social groups. But the discussion of ethics surrounding the design, deployment, and use of robots today remain limited by international, cultural and disciplinary boundaries.

Open Roboethics is the idea that, just like how the web has allowed us to produce and maintain contents of Wikipedia and software designs of Linux by means of mass collaboration, maybe roboethics discussions and robot designs can benefit from the power of mass collaboration. By creating a central web space where policy makers, engineers/designers, and users and other stakeholders of the technology can freely share and access roboethics related contents, we hope to accelerate roboethics discussions and inform robot designs.

The project is still taking its baby steps. But we’d like to hear your thoughts on Open Roboethics. Please feel free to contact AJung (email: ajung@amoon.ca, twitter:@RoboEthics) to send us your feedback.

I want to help build the Open Roboethics community. How can I help?

• Excellent! Subscribe to the roboethics@lists.mech.ubc.ca mailing list to keep up to date on the Open Roboethics initiative.
• To subscribe, please send an email to sympa@lists.mech.ubc.ca with the subject line “sub roboethics” (you don’t need to write anything in the body of the email) and you should receive a confirmation email. If you have any problem subscribing to the list, please send AJung an email (ajung@amoon.ca).
• To communicate with the rest of the Open Roboethics community, you can send an email to roboethics@lists.mech.ubc.ca from the email address you used to subscribe to the list.

What’s on this wiki?

The subwiki pages listed below contain notes taken from the presentation and discussion of the following paper at We Robot 2012 conference in order to foster more sharing of discussion contents throughout the roboethics community.

Since these notes were rushedly taken, please accept my (AJung) apologies for lack of credit on the ideas captured in these notes. If/when the recording of the sessions become online, I will link the videos to each of the pages.