Organizers:
Glenda Hannibal, Independent Researcher, Denmark
Felix Lindner, University of Freiburg, Germany
Date:
Wednesday, February 14, 09.00-12.00
Program including abstracts:
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Robo-philosophy 2018 is the third of its kind and with the ambition to include the research and insights from disciplines other than philosophy the themes of the conference are broad and open for various interpretations. Inclusion of other disciplines and perspectives can, however, also be achieved by ensuring that the conference participants get a chance to actively engage in a dialogue with each other in smaller groups where they reflect on how to benefit and advance social robotics with their respective knowledge and competences. In this sense the focus in this workshop is placed on creating a concrete setting in which the conference participants go from being passive listeners to engaging contributors in the task of thinking, engaging, and integrating social robotics into society. Considering this perspective the workshop aims to bring participants of the conference together to think actively about how to make social robotics more transdisciplinary after receiving input from the invited speakers. Among other questions, the discussion will include reflections on the possible benefits that transdisciplinarity will have for the development of social robotics as a research field and what needs to be done to establish a transdisciplinary research agenda and methodology for social robotics.
Organizers:
Maike Klein, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Simon Hoher, University of Applied Sciences Salzburg, Austria
Simone Kimpeler, Competence Center Foresight, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI, Germany
Maximilian Lehner, KU Linz, Austria
Funded by the Österreichische Forschungsgemeinschaft
Date:
Wednesday, February 14, 09.00-12.00
Program including abstracts:
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Debates around robots, both scientific and non-scientific, mostly put the human being in their focus. This is important and necessary to produce machines that humans can operate and interact with, and to do responsible research. We think, however, that the phenomenon of robots, and generally machines, is only fully comprehensible if we, the observers, step back and try to understand machines from another, unusual perspective: the machines themselves. We invite participants of this workshop to reflect upon machines, and especially robots, from a machine / robot point of view. What do robots do when we are not around? How do they spend the end of their working day? What do they appreciate or prefer? How, and what, do they communicate among each other? For instance, what were the two Facebook bots conferring about before some human turned them off? It is not our goal to design a post-human society but rather to explore what it means for our society not to consider robots only as agents that ought to be designed to carry out human tasks. In our opinion, we should take robots as robots seriously, because we often must rely upon them for good reasons. They help building our machines, guides us through art exhibitions, and assists in nursing. Thus, within this workshop, we would like to take a closer look at the robots themselves. We invite the participants to think away from a barely functional point of view, to think about the idea that robots are more than just the functional “partner” of humans.
Organizers:
Johanna Seibt, Aarhus University, Denmark (Steering Committee)
Kerstin Fischer, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Cathrine Hasse, Aarhus University, Denmark
Gunhild Berggren, Copenhagen University, Denmark
Date:
Wednesday, February 14, 14.30-16.00 and 16.30-18.30
Program including abstracts:
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This workshop aims to contribute to a better understanding of the possible socio-cultural, psychological, and ethical-existential implications of difference forms and modes of human-robot co-working. Work may be understood as (a) praxis, (b) conception, and (c) experience. While these three senses of work are multiply interdependent, we will focus on work as experienced activity. The workshop shall investigate phenomena and conceptua-lizations of work undertaken with or alongside several agents where one or more of these agents are artificial agents, with different types and degrees of affordances for social interaction.
While social robotics creates a “regulation problem” and a “description problem” that are intimately intertwined (Seibt2016), the focus of the workshop will be on description and analysis. The workshop will feature speakers from five different research lines that offer new descriptive tools and empirical results on forms and modes of co-working with robots. Some speakers will explore—from the perspectives of analytical and continental philosophy—the conceptual tasks that arise for a systematic social ontology of human-robot interaction. Other contributions will present empirical research on, as well as new practical initiatives for, new forms and modes of co-working. The regulation problem in social robotics will be addressed indirectly by providing insights into the conditions for creating satisfactory work experiences.
Organizer:
Charles Ess, University of Oslo, Norway
Date:
Wednesday, February 14, 16.30-18.30
Program including abstracts:
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Phronēsis is foregrounded in virtue ethics as the premier form of ethical judgment and excellence (virtue) required for making the often difficult ethical choices central to good lives and flourishing. At the same time, phronēsis is widely argued to be computationally non-tractable. Phronēsis is thereby a critical focus for machine ethics, AI, and robotics.
Our track on phronēsis and computation continues explorations from previous Robophilosophy conferences, and will include presentations by: Anne Gerdes (Southern Denmark University), John D. Sullins (Sonoma State University, CA, USA), and Selmer Bringsjord (Rennsaeler Polytechnic Institute) and colleagues on the "Making Morally Competent" robots project.
Organizer:
Zachery McDowell, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Date:
Thursday, February 15, 10.30-12.00
Program including abstracts:
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We are - it seems - in the midst of a robot apocalypse. This invasion, however, does not look like what we have been programmed to expect from decades of science fiction literature and film. It occurs not as a spectacular catastrophe involving a marauding army of alien machines dramatically descending from the heavens with weapons of immeasurable power. Instead, it takes place, and is already taking place, in ways that look more like the Fall of Rome than Battlestar Galactica, with different devices of various configurations and capabilities slowly but surely coming to take up increasingly important and influential positions in everyday social reality—self-driving vehicles, recommendation algorithms, machine learning decision making systems, and social robots of various forms and configurations.
Critical responses to this opportunity and challenge often target and are typically concerned with the capabilities of these mechanisms, the methods of ensuring their safe operation, and the social consequences of increased automation in all parts of our world. Largely missing from the conversation is an examination of the social contexts and systems of power in which robots, AI, and other autonomous systems will be developed and deployed. If during the industrial revolution one of the operative questions was who owned and controlled the means of production, we should ask a similar question in the face of the robot revolution: who will develop, own, and control the robots? This panel seeks to remediate this oversight by initiating a conversation about the political economy of robots. In doing so, it responds directly and explicitly to the conference theme: “Envisioning Robots in Society: Politics, Power and Public Space.”
Organizers:
Michael Filzmoser, TU Wien, Austria
Sabine Koeszegi, TU Wien, Austria
Sladjana Nørskov, Aarhus University, Denmark
John Ulhøi, Aarhus University, Denmark
Date:
Thursday, February 15, 10.30-12.00
Program including abstracts:
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Recent technological development suggests a potential for replacing and/or supplementing previous exclusively human-based business processes with social robots. This workshop seeks to discuss business activities in which the use of social robots may (or may not) offer potential for new ways of organizing and/or reducing existing organizational problems. In this workshop the following questions are therefore put forward: Which key social robotics-related drivers and barriers may affect the adoption process and with what effects on human behaviour? How, when, why, and under what conditions does the adoption of social robots improve business processes? These questions will be discussed from a business and management perspective.
Organizers:
John P. Sullins, Sonoma State University, USA
Robin L. Zebrowski, Beloit College, USA
Date:
Thursday, February 15, 10.30-12.00
Program including abstracts:
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Drawing on work by Wallach and Allen (2008), artificial moral agents (AMAs) are AI and robotic agents that are built to consider ethical norms when deciding on actions that have moral impacts on other human and artificial agents. In this panel, we will discuss the role that consciousness might play in moral reasoning and whether artificial agents will need to have some form of consciousness in order to be effective moral agents. Regardless of the answer to this question, we will also explore whether artificial consciousness might place stronger moral clams on humans in their relations to artificial agents. Would conscious AMAs have a stronger claim to being moral patients?
Organizers:
Cathrine Hasse, Aarhus University, Danish School of Education, Denmark
Stine Trentemøller, Aarhus University, Danish School of Education, Denmark
Jessica Sorensen, Aarhus University, Danish School of Education, Denmark
Ben Vermeulen, University of Hohenheim, Germany
Date:
Thursday, February 15, 10.30-12.00 and 14.30-16.30
Program including abstracts:
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In this document, we present a proposal for a workshop centered around the theme of robots and work, with consideration of the ethical, socio-cultural, economic and political impacts of robot implementation in the workplace. Workshop participation involves live voting, breakout groups, and an expert panel discussion. As a foundation for the workshop activities, we present our research in the REELER project. REELER aims to develop a Roadmap for responsible ethical learning in robotics to address human needs and societal concerns. We will achieve this through ethnographic research of minimum ten unique robot cases across Europe. We consider this work highly relevant to the state of affairs in robotics and industry and to the topics of this year’s Robophilosophy conference.
Organizers:
Michael Funk, University of Vienna, Austria
Bernhard Dieber, JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Austria
Date:
Thursday, February 15, 14.30-15.30
Program including abstracts:
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This workshop aims to bring together philosophy of technology and robotics engineering with a focus on a concrete robotics application: the “ABB Yumi”. Following a transdisciplinary methodology concrete technical applications of this robot are practically performed, explained by a robotics expert and commented by a philosopher of technology. Thereby the focus will be on responsibility, risk and security as both technical as well as philosophical concepts; and on the question: How is the VDI/FEANI ethics-codex “Fundamentals of Engineering Ethics” (https://www.vdi.de/fileadmin/media/content/hg/17.pdf) concretely applied while using the robot Yumi?
Organizer:
Oliver Schürer, Technische Universität Vienna, Austria
Date:
Thursday, February 15, 14.30-16.30
Program including abstracts:
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In urgency to govern the emergent robot development, the European Committee published a draft report on “Civil Law Rules on Robotics”. Here privacy, general well-being, and job-loss through automation are the main issues raised. Surprisingly, there is next to nothing on changes in public, semi-public, private, and intimate spaces – that is, of cultural spaces. Human fantasies for the use of humanoid robots come in a variety of guises: from workers, soldiers and servants to entertainers, nurses and playmates, including sex partners. But policy agenda pushes the social aspect of assistive robots for care work (elderly, dementia) in the forefront. In any case, humanoid robots will not only become functional assistants and next media, but moreover also socio-cultural actors in cultural spaces, always already transgressing thresholds between culturally conditioned public, semiprivate, private and intimate spaces.
The workshop will explore the spatial and socio-political consequences threefold: The literally most visible problem in robotic care work is the human urge to antropomorphize those machines. According to the uncanny valley effect, this is prone to fail time and again, so how human-like should a humanoid be?
Besides the visual uneasiness there are all kinds of suspicions towards robots, especially in intimate spaces. But they are about to take in a completely novel position besides existing technical objects, plants and animals. How can we think relationships with those new artifacts in cultural spaces?
Any concept of space relies on the properties of the system perceiving it. Machinic and human perception systems differ harshly. But humanoid robots are about to establish relationships with spatial and social structures, act within these, and will form them to a certain extent. How can we share the same cultural space with humanoid robots?
Organizer:
David Gunkel, Northern Illinois University, USA
Date:
Thursday, February 15, 14.30-16.30
Program including abstracts:
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Although considerable effort has been expended on the question of robots and responsibility, the question concerning “robot rights” remains conspicuously absent or at least marginalized. This workshop is designed to respond to and advance research on this other question. It is interested in and dedicated to debating the social situation and status of robots. And it does so not to be controversial, even if “controversy” is often the result of this kind of philosophical provocation, but in order to respond to very real and pressing challenges concerning innovations in technology and the current state and future possibilities of moral philosophy.
Organizers:
Jennifer Robertson, University of Michigan, USA
Marco Nørskov, Aarhus University, Denmark and Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Japan
Date:
Friday, February 16, 10.30-12.00 and 14.30-16.30
Program including abstracts:
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Technology, including robotics, and culture are intertwined and even mutually constitutive processes. Both technology and culture operate on many levels that are categorized for the purposes of this workshop as global, local, and “glocal.” As evident in popular and scholarly media, robots made in Japan are often described as inseparably bound to Japanese culture whereas robots made in Europe or the United States are treated as if immune from local/cultural influences and priorities. Our workshop will problematize and fine-tune the category of “Japanese robots” by exploring robots designed and manufactured in Japan AND deployed in local, global, and "glocal" contexts and environments. In addition to providing empirical information on new directions and applications in robotics, a key objective of the workshop is the development of a method of researching and representing robots and robotics that is attentive and sensitive to both the intersections and divergences of local and global, and glocal, applications.
Organizers:
Kerstin Fischer, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Johanna Seibt, Aarhus University, Denmark
Norbert Krüger, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Date:
Friday, February 16, 14.30-16.30
Program including abstracts:
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This workshop will take the form of a conference lab—it shall both illustrate and further explore in which ways wide.scope interdiscplinarity is an indispensable ingredient for the development of successful applications of social robotics. The workshop will discuss three use cases as envisaged in the context of the SMOOTH project; currently these applications, which concern transporting and guiding functions in an eldercare facility, are being developed by robotics engineers in close collaboration with the staff of the care facility, with focus on practical functionalities. Fundamental questions about the design of the robots (shape and movements) are still open. The workshop will feature short ‘booster talks’ by specialists in design, ethics, interaction studies, and gerontopsychology. A joint moderated discussion with all participants will subsequently explore the significance of design choices in several regards (therapeutic, socio-cultural, and ethical). Workshop participants will get the chance to communicate their views in different ways during the workshop The main aim of the workshop is to use the concrete design problems of the SMOOTH project in order to address general methodological questions about the implementation of current R&D paradigms currently discussed under the headers of “value-sensitive design,” “design for values,” “integrative social robotics,” and “responsible robotics.
Organizer:
Bertram Malle, Brown University, USA
Date:
Friday, February 16, 14.30-16.30
Program including abstracts:
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The rapid advance of technology supporting autonomous vehicles (AV) places significant demands on scholars, legislators, and the general public to grapple with the many social and ethical implications that this completely new form of transportation brings. This workshop features scholars from numerous disciplines to ask and discuss probing questions about a society with AVs: How and where will people live, and who will benefit? What legal frameworks are needed to integrate AVs into society? Who brings AVs in line with social and moral norms, and who is responsible when they violate those norms?
