SC15: Robot Ethics

Speaker

Thomas Christaller

Content

Science and technology have an impact for those who are doing the research and development as well as enterprises, organisations, lay people, and societies who are producing, exploiting, using it. Beside curiosity and trying to be the first with an important insight or with a successful product scientists, researchers, and engineers should think about possible consequences of their actions, ideas, models, and prototypes. Since the invention of the term robot the bright and the dark sides of real and imaginated intelligent artifacts were discussed. In the course Robot Ethics we will explore some issues related to intelligent or autonomous artefacts, sometimes called robots. We will try to figure out what could be meaningfully understood by these terms, what make them special if we look at humans and what could it mean if we talk about robots. We have to understand the differences between man and machine, as well as the intentions or promises standing behind the whole endeavor to construct such robots: Support for elder people in demographically changing societies, being Ersatz-soldiers in warfare, becoming the best friend of a child, just to name a few topics where ethical questions come to mind. The course will hopefully be an open discussion and not so much a typical lecture.

Disciplines
Philosophical issues with regard to sciences and engineering disciplines related to robotics.

References

CV

Studying intelligence, cognition, and autonomy by building artefacts for more then 30 years, I came to a debatable but clear model of natural intelligence. From the beginning of my academic career I participated in many discussions and projects reflecting AI research and especially cognitive robotics together with philosophers and colleagues of other disciplines as well as media people, companies, and decision makers including politicians.

 

Last update: 26.01.2011, Webadmin
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