Abstract
Emerging technologies like robotics for war and peace stress our moral norms and generate much public interest and controversy. We use this interest to attract participants to an innovative on-line survey platform, designed for experimenting with public engagement in the ethics of technology. In particular, the N-Reasons platform addresses several issues in democratic ethics: the cost of public participation, the methodological issue of feasible reflective ethical equilibrium (how can individuals in a large group, take into account the ethical views of all others?), and the reliability of public participation processes. We sketch the motivation and design of the N-Reasons platform, stressing the need for a practical (fast, low-cost) instrument that makes equilibrium feasible. We focus on the Robot Ethics Survey that featured a set of nine ethical challenges raised by robotics for war and peace. Over 400 people in five disjoint groups participated in this on-line survey experiment. We analyze the results, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the participants’ decisions taken and the reasons supporting these decisions. Both decisions and reasons strongly distinguished lethal military robotics from peace-related robotics. Methodologically, both decisions and reasons over five distinct groups were remarkably consistent.
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Notes
We invite you to take the survey or to use it in your own teaching. We can provide ways to identify groups of users’ responses for debriefing.
N-Reasons operationalizes a rather minimal concept of a reason: a decision paired by the prompt “because” to a text field. Further conditions could be imposed (and were in early prototypes). On reflection, we decided it would be better if conditions were imposed by the participants rather than by the designers. This furthers goal 2 of our research: to remove expert content from the design, as it burdens our premises and weakens our conclusions.
Participants in the first four groups saw reasons ranked by votes; the fifth group used our platform’s newest display ranking algorithm, which blends popularity and recency to mitigate the primacy effect favoring early contributions (see Danielson 2011a).
In this survey, we did not feed back (a chart of) the developing decision, although we plan to experiment again with this form of feedback, used in our pre-N-Reasons experimental designs. One can see what this would look like at http://yourviews.ubc.ca/en/Robot_Ethics_Results, which also includes full-page displays of each question.
We could, alternatively, look at the sample, but this survey was not designed for sample-based representativeness. Note also that the need to have all participants see the same questions over the 2-year run of the survey kept us from updating the scenarios, some of which are getting a bit out of date.
We include question 7 about the trolley problem, as it is relevant to the issue of survey reliability. Note that question 7 attracted the most neutral decisions, often around protest reasons like “I am boycotting trolley problems.”
The last group (class 4) used a revised platform that allowed split votes, allowing fractional vote totals.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by Genome Canada through the offices of Genome British Columbia. Thanks to the NERD research team for contribution to the survey design and implementation and to the participants for their enthusiastic involvement.
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Danielson, P. Engaging the Public in the Ethics of Robots for War and Peace. Philos. Technol. 24, 239–249 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0025-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0025-8