RoboTIPS: Developing Responsible Robots for the Digital Economy

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This fellowship will bring together a variety of people from different walks of life, including academics, industry, civil societies, policy makers and members of the public, in order to create new ways of developing and managing technological innovations. There is often a tension between the economic needs for increasing technological innovation and the ways in which these innovations may be developed responsibly - that is in a manner that is societally acceptable and desirable. We will develop an approach that aims to anticipate not only the positive outcomes but also the potentially negative consequences of technological innovations for society. We will draw on this and an understanding of people's lived rights and obligations to provide creative resources and methods for designers to develop responsible and accountable new technologies. Responsible Innovation lies at the heart of technologies in the Digital economy that aim to promote trust, identity, privacy and security. Although it has been drawn on in other scientific domains, as yet we have no complete example of how responsible innovation can be successfully applied in the DE sector. The fellowship will consider a motivating example to develop responsible innovation in action. We will look into one particular domain of technology and develop an agile process which will take account of the views of a wide range of people in a fast-changing context, in order to have some influence over the trajectory of an innovation. We will focus on the domain of social robots, those which interact with people and make decisions about what to do on their own accord. Because they make their own decisions in order to perform actions, we need to be able to recover what they did and why they did it, when things seem to go wrong. We will develop an ethical black box (EBB) through which the social robot will be able to explain its behaviour in simple and understandable ways. The development of the EBB will be an example of responsible innovation. We will test this out in particular accident investigations as a social process and we will do this in 3 different study domains. In the final stages of the fellowship, we will show the outcomes of the technological development and the investigations through a variety of means, including through the web and a final public showcase event. This will be to a variety of people including the general public, policy makers, and developers.