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 driven design), emerging new ethical standards including BS8611 and the powerful method Ethical Risk Assessment,  IEEE 7001 on Transparency, and equally essential Ethical Governance, while showing ho ..read more

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 establishing accountability and responsibility. Since then, within the RoboTIPS project, we have developed and tested several model EBBs, including one for an e-puck robot that I wrote about in this blog, and ..read more

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 into account ethical harms alongside physical harms, then the potential for accidents increases still further. Psychological harms include addiction, over trusting, or deception, and societal harms i ..read more

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 thought about alot in recent months. Here are the slides exploring that question.   And here is what I said. Early in 2018 I wrote a short blog post with the title Ethical Governance: what i ..read more

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 incredibly dull but important because it generates training data sets for machine learning systems. Those systems could be AIs for autonomous vehicles and the images are identifying bicycles, tr ..read more

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 far is surprising - and not in a good way. So far I've looked into the energy costs of (i) uploading to the cloud, (ii) streaming video (i.e. from iPlayer or Netflix), and (iii) video conferencing. (i ..read more

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 responsible robotics as ... the application of Responsible Innovation in the design, manufacture, operation, repair and end-of-life recycling of robots, that seeks the most benefit to society a ..read more

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): Having reached this point I needed a robot - and a way of communicating with it - so that I could both write getRobotData(spec) and test the EBB. But how to do this? I'm ..read more

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 incorporated into a robot. Conceptually the EBB is very simple, it is a data logger - the robot equivalent of an aircraft Flight Data Recorder, or an automotive Event Data Recorder. Nearly five years ago I made t ..read more

    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 celebs and the mayor of Pasadena started getting calls too – it got real serious real fast. The mayor called my chief: he was furious that someone was imperson ..read more