Workshop: The Emerging Policy and Ethics of Human Robot Interaction; Portland, Oregon - March, 2015

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General Audience SummaryThis workshop aims to bring together multiple stakeholder groups to anticipate and grapple with significant normative, legal, and policy questions concerning robots in human social environments. Such robots are likely to have substantial impacts on daily life in the near future, meaning that now is the time for researchers in the social sciences and robotics, industry leaders, and government experts to begin drafting ethical and policy guidelines for a new era that is on the horizon. The primary goal of this workshop is to do so in a balanced, integrative way that serves to promote mutual education and grounding. The expected product is a working consensus document for the professional community that will be shared broadly. Invited panelists will include senior women and others from underrepresented groups, including engineers with disabilities. Students from underrepresented groups will be encouraged to participate through travel grants. Citizen journalism of the event will be implemented by live tweeting, and questions from remote participants will be fielded, to enable even more widespread participation.Technical Summary The workshop will focus on several topics of high relevance concerning policy and ethical issues within the context of human-robot interaction; key topics include healthcare, morphology, and autonomy. With regards to healthcare, robots are deployed in therapeutic settings with vulnerable populations; for example, to help treat children with developmental disabilities, to encourage pro-social behavior among older adults, and to assist people with daily living tasks, such as bathing, manipulation, mobility. Such uses raise substantial concerns regarding client privacy and human caregiver displacement. With regards to morphology, there are concerns that increasingly anthropomorphic robots not only convey inaccurate expectations to people about robot capabilities, but may also be unethical when treating vulnerable populations; people with cognitive disabilities may be vulnerable to psychological manipulation, such as exploiting emotional attachments to swindle users. With regards to autonomy, control handoff to robots puts the burden of ethical and policy considerations on designers. As a result, the management of liability and risk via insurance (for example) would need to be re-calibrated.