Should The Law Punish Robot Tasks Differently?
By Ryan Calo on May 19, 2010 at 3:54 pm
I attended a fascinating thesis defense today on the subject of human-robot interaction by Stanford PhD candidate Victoria Groom. HRI experiments apparently tend to focus on human encounters with robots; few studies test the psychology behind robot operation. Groom’s work explores how we feel about the tasks we perform through robots. One of the more interesting questions she and her colleagues ask is: to what extent do we feel like it’s really us performing the task? The question is important where, as in the military, people work through robots to carry out morally charged tasks. And the answer might have repercussions for how we think about evaluation and punishment. Read more about Should The Law Punish Robot Tasks Differently?