Stanford CIS

Robot Ethics: A Crash Course

By Patrick Lin on

Here's a preview of my forthcoming paper on robot ethics (with co-authors Keith Abney and George Bekey) in Artificial Intelligence journal, one of the best in its field.

As with other emerging technologies, advanced robotics brings with it new ethical and policy challenges. This paper will describe the flourishing role of robots in society—from security to sex—and survey the numerous ethical and social issues, which we locate in three broad categories: safety & errors, law & ethics, and social impact. We discuss many of these issues in greater detail in our forthcoming edited volume on robot ethics from MIT Press.

Link to full paper here (free access as of right now): "Robot Ethics: Mapping the Issues for a Mechanized World."

This paper is based on the introductory chapter of our edited volume on robot ethics, forthcoming from MIT Press in late December. This book involves Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, since it is mentioned as my affiliation in both the paper and in the forthcoming book; and Ryan Calo, a CIS project director, also contributed a paper on to the edited volume here: "Robots and Privacy."

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