Responsible Robotics is about developing robots in ways that take their social implications into account, which includes conceptually framing robots and their role in the world accurately. We are now in the process of incorporating robots into our world and we are trying to figure out what to make of them and where to put them in our conceptual, physical, economic, legal, emotional and moral world. How humans think about robots, especially humanoid social robots, which elicit complex and sometimes disconcerting (...) reactions, is not predetermined. The animal–robot analogy is one of the most commonly used in attempting to frame interactions between humans and robots and it also tends to push in the direction of blurring the distinction between humans and machines. We argue that, despite some shared characteristics, when it comes to thinking about the moral status of humanoid robots, legal liability, and the impact of treatment of humanoid robots on how humans treat one another, analogies with animals are misleading. (shrink)

A critically important ethical issue facing the AI research community is how AI research and AI products can be responsibly conceptualised and presented to the public. A good deal of fear and concern about uncontrollable AI is now being displayed in public discourse. Public understanding of AI is being shaped in a way that may ultimately impede AI research. The public discourse as well as discourse among AI researchers leads to at least two problems: a confusion about the notion of (...) ‘autonomy’ that induces people to attribute to machines something comparable to human autonomy, and a ‘sociotechnical blindness’ that hides the essential role played by humans at every stage of the design and deployment of an AI system. Here our purpose is to develop and use a language with the aim to reframe the discourse in AI and shed light on the real issues in the discipline. (shrink)

The concept of agency as applied to technological artifacts has become an object of heated debate in the context of AI research because some AI researchers ascribe to programs the type of agency traditionally associated with humans. Confusion about agency is at the root of misconceptions about the possibilities for future AI. We introduce the concept of a triadic agency that includes the causal agency of artifacts and the intentional agency of humans to better describe what happens in AI as (...) it functions in real-world contexts. We use the VW emission fraud case to explain triadic agency since in this case a technological artifact, namely software, was an essential part of the wrongdoing and the software might be said to have agency in the wrongdoing. We then extend the case to include futuristic AI, imagining AI that becomes more and more autonomous. (shrink)

The question about the scientific nature of computing has been widely debated with no universal consensus reached about its disciplinary status. Positions vary from acknowledging computing as the science of computers to defining it as a synthetic engineering discipline. In this paper, we aim at discussing the nature of computing from a methodological perspective. We consider, in particular, the nature and role of experiments in this field, whether they can be considered close to the traditional experimental scientific method or, instead, (...) they possess peculiar and unique features. We argue that this experimental perspective should be taken into account when discussing the status of computing. We critically survey how the experimental method has been conceived and applied in computing, and some open issues that could be tackled with the aid of the history of science, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

A discussion concerning whether to conceive Artificial Intelligence systems as responsible moral entities, also known as “artificial moral agents”, has been going on for some time. In this regard, we argue that the notion of “moral agency” is to be attributed only to humans based on their autonomy and sentience, which AI systems lack. We analyze human responsibility in the presence of AI systems in terms of meaningful control and due diligence and argue against fully automated systems in medicine. With (...) this perspective in mind, we focus on the use of AI-based diagnostic systems and shed light on the complex networks of persons, organizations and artifacts that come to be when AI systems are designed, developed, and used in medicine. We then discuss relational criteria of judgment in support of the attribution of responsibility to humans when adverse events are caused or induced by errors in AI systems. (shrink)

Scholarship on embedding values in AI is growing. In what follows, we distinguish two concepts of AI and argue that neither is amenable to values being ‘embedded’. If we think of AI as computational artifacts, then values and AI cannot be added together because they are ontologically distinct. If we think of AI as sociotechnical systems, then components of values and AI are in the same ontologic category—they are both social. However, even here thinking about the relationship as one of (...) ‘embedding’ is a mischaracterization. The relationship between values and AI is best understood as a dimension of the relationship between technology and society, a relationship that can be theorized in multiple ways. The literature in this area is consistent in showing that technology and society are co-productive. Within the co-production framework, the relationship between values and AI is shown to be generative of new meaning. This stands in stark contrast to the framework of ‘embedding’ values which frames values as fixed things that can be inserted into technological artifacts. (shrink)

This co-edited volume compares Chinese and Western experiences of engineering, technology, and development. In doing so, it builds a bridge between the East and West and advances a dialogue in the philosophy of engineering. Divided into three parts, the book starts with studies on epistemological and ontological issues, with a special focus on engineering design, creativity, management, feasibility, and sustainability. Part II considers relationships between the history and philosophy of engineering, and includes a general argument for the necessity of dialogue (...) between history and philosophy. It continues with a general introduction to traditional Chinese attitudes toward engineering and technology, and philosophical case studies of the Chinese steel industry, railroads, and cybernetics in the Soviet Union. Part III focuses on engineering, ethics, and society, with chapters on engineering education and practice in China and the West. The book’s analyses of the interactions of science, engineering, ethics, politics, and policy in different societal contexts are of special interest. The volume as a whole marks a new stage in the emergence of the philosophy of engineering as a new regionalization of philosophy. This carefully edited interdisciplinary volume grew out of an international conference on the philosophy of engineering hosted by the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. It includes 30 contributions by leading philosophers, social scientists, and engineers from Australia, China, Europe, and the United States. (shrink)

Experiments in computing share many characteristics with the traditional experimental method, but also present significant differences from a practical perspective, due to their aim at producing software artifacts and the central role played by human actors and organizations involved in the software development process. By analyzing some of the most significant experiments in the subfield of software engineering, we aim at showing how the conceptual framework that supports experimental methodology in this context needs an extension in a socio-technical perspective.

Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) have recently acquired a primary role in open multiagent systems, which need a standard communication framework shared by all interacting heterogeneous agents. According to the most important ACL standard proposals so far, agents are supposed to carry out the communication process by performing actions of a specific type, namely, communicative acts, whose semantics is defined in terms of the agents’ mental states. Although following the mainstream guidelines inspired by the Speech Act Theory, our work illustrates an (...) alternative model of agent communication, by shifting the focus from agents’ mental states to their social state. Taking an existing communicative act library, we provide a semantics for a significant set of acts based on the concept of commitment, and prove that our approach tackles some issues that have not been dealt with in an effective way yet and that may have hindered the rise of an universally accepted ACL standard. (shrink)

One extreme example of intergenerational environmental change is given by nuclear waste. The radiation from a typical nuclear waste assembly will remain fatal for humans for millennia, creating the problem of communicating a warning about hazardous repositories to people so far in the future that we cannot assume any common ground with them in terms of languages and cultural contexts. This poses limitations to solutions proposed in the context of semiotics. The need for communicating danger and for keeping future people (...) away from certain sites may be tackled from a more sensorial and aesthetic perspective. Given the size of nuclear waste repositories, and the problem of keeping people at a distance, the dimension at which the problem must be tackled is environmental. This work argues for an exploration of what environmental aesthetics, despite and perhaps thanks to all the ongoing definitional and conceptual debates in the discipline, has to offer. (shrink)

Software agents’ ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents’ interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open systems interacting agents may not conform to predefined specifications. A possible solution is to define interaction environments including a normative component, with (...) suitable rules to regulate the behaviour of agents. To tackle this problem we propose an application-independent metamodel of artificial institutions that can be used to define open multiagent systems. In our view an artificial institution is made up by an ontology that models the social context of the interaction, a set of authorizations to act on the institutional context, a set of linguistic conventions for the performance of institutional actions and a system of norms that are necessary to constrain the agents’ actions. (shrink)