PHIL 3350 – Department of Philosophy, Carleton University
Professor: Jason Millar
(NOTE: Welcome to the Roboethics blog. This is the course blog for PHIL 3350 – Roboethics. The posts on this site are primarily student posts, with the exception of a few posts of interest by myself (Jason Millar). The work contained is not my academic work, but is related to it, and so it should be read more as posts of interest rather than posts indicating my academic projects/views. Confused? Welcome to the world of blogs!)
The government of South Korea has a vision: a robot in every household by 2020. To make that vision reality their Ministry of Information and Communication has enlisted no fewer than 30 companies and 1,000 scientists to help research and develop robotics technologies and policies. The desire to expand and study the role of robotics in society is widespread, with similar projects underway in Europe, North America and other parts of Asia. Internationally, research in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics has acquired a new sense of promise over the past decade. That is due in part to recent synergies between mathematics, neuroscience, computer science and psychology, and also to recent field “successes” with military robots, autonomous online agents and service bots. Consider Watson, IBM’s artificial Jeopardy! contestant. Watson recently beat two of Jeopardy!’s most winning human players in a match they called “Man vs. Machine”. Robots are beginning to assume humanlike roles in society: establishing personal relationships with humans; teaching students; patrolling war zones; and caring for the elderly. Indeed, the pace of innovation suggests that future generations of robots will be quite unlike their “simple-minded” ancestors. Robots are increasingly autonomous by design and, according to many scientists and philosophers, they will surpass human intelligence within the next half-century. Eventually it might be extremely difficult to distinguish robots from humans.
Robots are challenging many of our philosophical and ethical notions while suggesting the need for new public policy. Along with their vision, South Korea announced they were working on a draft of an official Robot Ethics Charter (drawing largely from Asimov’s three laws) that would regulate both the design of robots and human-robot interactions. Similarly, the European Commission has sponsored research into “roboethics” as a means of anticipating the ethical challenges associated with pursuing various robot technologies and deploying them in, and across, societies.
What is a robot? Can robots follow rules? What role does “code” play in the ethical programming of robots and in society? Can robots have moral agency? What would that agency look like? What are the current directions in roboethics, and robot design, and are they adequate/justifiable? What kinds of relationships ought we to encourage between robots and humans, or robots and robots? What norms, if any, ought to be considered with respect to governing the design of, and interaction with, robots? What might we owe robots in the future?
Course Objectives:
The goal of this course is to investigate the above questions through an examination of classic and contemporary texts in ethics, philosophy of mind, science and technology studies, public policy, and a newly emerging area called “roboethics”. Students will be challenged to consider how philosophical concepts including identity, consciousness, moral agency, personhood, artificial intelligence, and rationality apply to roboethics. As this course focuses on ethics and policy issues, an emphasis will be placed on examining and developing normative claims from the literature. By engaging public policy documents students will also have an opportunity to examine and critique the application of philosophical concepts in the context of interdisciplinary science debates.