Mostly, but not exclusively, about robots
On Thursday 5th June I gave a keynote talk for workshop Machines with Morals: interdisciplinary perspectives organised by Rebecca Raper and Oliver Bridge at Cranfield University. Slide 2 Robot ethics and machine ethics are two sides of the same coin. Robot ethics are ethics for humans. Machine ethics are ethics for robots. Slide 3 But robot ethics and machine ethics are at very different levels of…
I gave a talk on AI for the Swindon Science Cafe . Here below are the slides, followed by my notes. Slide 1 Hi, my name is Alan Winfield. Thank you Rod and Claire for inviting me to speak this evening. Slide 2 So, what does a robot and AI ethicist do? Well, the short answer is worry. I worry about the ethical and societal impact of AI on individuals, society and the environment. Here are some…
Earlier this month I was privileged to part of the inaugural conference of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI . The two day conference was held in Paris, on February 6 th and 7 th , and hosted by the OECD. The timing and location of the conference was arranged to directly precede the governmental AI summit on February 10 th and 11 th . I was one of around 650 invited…
Back in February I posted a very brief account of our third RoboTIPS simulated accident and investigation, centred on an upper-body exoskeletion in an industrial setting. Since then we've published a paper with a full account . My colleague Pericle Salvini presented the paper at the 9th International Conference on Robot Ethics and Standards (ICRES 2024), last week. Here is the paper abstract: This…
On Wednesday 21 February we ran the third of our RoboTIPS simulated accident scenarios in the Bristol Robotics Lab. This scenario focussed on an upper-body exoskeleton in an industrial environment. Above left we see Dan working to move boxes, with the physical support of the wonderful Tribonix exoskeleton. On the right Dan has fallen to the floor, attended by his manager Monica and paramedic Ben.…
About 5 years ago we proposed that all robots should be fitted with the robot equivalent of an aircraft Flight Data Recorder to continuously record sensor and relevant internal status data. We call this an ethical black box (EBB) . We argued that an ethical black box will play a key role in the processes of discovering why and how a robot caused an accident , and thus an essential part of…
Robot accidents are inevitable. These days the likelihood of serious accidents involving industrial robots is pretty low (but not zero), because such robots are generally inside safety cages. But a newer generation of social robots - robots designed to interact directly with people, including vulnerable elderly people or children - means that accidents are now much more likely. And if we also take…
This morning I took part in the first panel at the BSI conference The Digital World: Artificial Intelligence . The subject of the panel was AI Governance and Ethics. My co-panelist was Emma Carmel , and we were expertly chaired by Katherine Holden . Emma and I each gave short opening presentations prior to the Q&A. The title of my talk was Why is Ethical Governance in AI so hard? Something I've…
The reality is that AI is in fact generating a large number of jobs already. That is the good news. The bad news is that they are mostly - to put it bluntly - crap jobs. There are several categories of such jobs. At the benign end of the spectrum is the work of annotating images, i.e. looking at images and identifying features then labelling them. This is AI tagging. This work is simple and…
Readers of his blog will know that one of the many things ethical I worry about is the energy cost of AI . As part of the work I'm doing with Claudia Pagliari and her National Expert Group on Digital Ethics for Scotland I've been looking also into the energy costs of what is - for many of us - everyday digital life in lockdown. I don't yet have a complete set of results but what I have found so…
The climate emergency brooks no compromise: every human activity or artefact is either part of the solution or it is part of the problem. I've worried about the sustainability of consumer electronics for some time, and, more recently, the shocking energy costs of big AI . But the climate emergency has also caused me to think hard about the sustainability of robots. In recent papers we have defined…
In part 2 a few weeks ago I outlined a Python implementation of the ethical black box. I described the key data structure - a dictionary which serves as both specification for the type of robot, and the data structure used to deliver live data to the EBB. I also mentioned the other key robot specific code: # Get data from the robot and store it in data structure spec def getRobotData (spec):…
In the last few days I started some serious coding. The first for 20 years, in fact, when I built the software for the BRL LinuxBots . (The coding I did six months ago doesn't really count as I was only writing or modifying small fragments of Python). My coding project is to start building an ethical black box (EBB), or to be more accurate, a module that will allow a software EBB to be…
Big day today. My online course on Robot Ethics has been launched on the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Academy web pages . The aim of the course is to give a comprehensive introduction to robot ethics and responsible robotics, and machine ethics. As well as ethical principles the course introduces powerful practical tools including Ethically Aligned Design (also called values…
Now it’s personal. I’ve just had a phone call from my mom. Fine, you might think, but it’s sure as hell not fine. She’s been dead 5 years. So, I’m a member of the LAPD CSI assigned to cyber crime. The case that landed on my desk a couple of weeks ago started as a complaint that folk were getting phone calls from dead relatives. At first we thought it was a joke. But after a couple of Hollywood…
For this story, written as the second exercise in my Writing Short Stories course back in June , I attempted a story without dialogue. I love dialogue so expected to find this difficult, which it was. In the story I try to imagine what it might have been like to experience an extinction event, in an effort to capture a sense of being in the liminal state from a limited first-person (or rather…
Back in June I signed up for an online course on Writing Short Stories (the next steps) , run by the Bishopsgate Institute . The course was excellent. There were six weekly zoom sessions of about 2 hours each, with 8 students led by Barbara Marsh , who is a wonderful tutor. I can honestly say that I enjoyed every minute. There was a fair bit of homework including, of course, writing - and a major…
A few weeks ago I gave a short paper* at the excellent International Conference on Robot Ethics and Standards (ICRES 2020) , outlining a case study in Ethical Risk Assessment - see our paper here . Our chosen case study is a robot teddy bear, inspired by one of my favourite movie robots: Teddy, in A.I. Artificial Intelligence . Although Ethical Risk Assessment (ERA) is not new - it is after all…
This week I have been attending (virtually) the excellent RoboPhilosophy conference, and this morning gave a plenary talk "Why did you just do that?" Here is the abstract: An important aspect of transparency is enabling a user to understand what a robot might do in different circumstances. An elderly person might be very unsure about robots, so it is important that her assisted living robot is…
One of the many things I promised myself when I retired nearly two years ago was to get back to some coding. Why? Two reasons: one is that writing and debugging code is hugely satisfying - for those like me not smart enough to do pure maths or theoretical physics - it's the closest you can get to working with pure mind stuff . But the second is that I want to prototype a number of ideas in…
Yesterday I gave an talk at the ICRA 2020 workshop Against Robot Dystopias . The workshop should have been in Paris but - like most academic meetings during the lockdown - was held online. In the zoom chat window toward the end of the workshop many of us were wistfully imagining continued discussions in a Parisian bar over a few glasses of wine. Next year I hope. The workshop was excellent and all…
It's been over a year since my last progress report from the Autonomous Robot Evolution (ARE) project , so an update on the ARE Robot Fabricator (RoboFab) is long overdue. There have been several significant advances. First is integration of each of the elements of RoboFab. Second is the design and implementation of an assembly fixture, and third significantly improved wiring. Here is a CAD…
Robots. What could possibly go wrong? Imagine that your elderly mother, or grandmother, has an assisted living robot to help her live independently at home. The robot is capable of fetching her drinks, reminding her to take her medicine and keeping in touch with family. Then one afternoon you get a call from a neighbour who has called round and sees your grandmother collapsed on the floor. When…
For many researchers the Holy Grail of robotics and AI is the creation of artificial persons: artefacts with equivalent general competencies as humans. Such artefacts would literally be simulations of humans. Some researchers are motivated by the utility of AGI; others have an almost religious faith in the transhumanist promise of the technological singularity. Others, like myself, are driven only…
Here are the slides for my keynote, presented this morning at the International Conference on Robot Ethics and Standards (ICRES 2019) . The talk is based on my paper Ethical Standards in Robotics and AI published in Nature Electronics a few months ago ( here is a pre-print ). To see the speaker notes click on the options button on the google slides toolbar above.