As applications of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) extend to areas outside of industrial environments, it is increasingly important for designers and policy makers to address the question of “What should an autonomous system do?”
For example, what should a robot do when it is on an urgent mission to deliver a package to someone upstairs, but the elevator is already occupied by someone else? Designing the robot to always yield (or never yield) might be a matter of a design decision for roboticists. But it also has normative implications with regards to systematically shaping priority relationships in human-robot interaction.
The speaker advocates that designers shouldn't be the only ones left with the task of figuring out answers to these questions, especially when there's lack of guidelines on what the right answers are and how to implement them. The future adopters need to have increased awareness of how to use these technologies in a way that connects to their social and ethical ideals. Drawing from examples in roboethics and AI ethics, this talk will present approaches to integrating ethics in the design of autonomous systems and how we could go about improving how we use them at work and home.
Speaker Bio:
Shalaleh Rismani is the executive member of Open Roboethics Institute which spun out of the Open Roboethics initiative (ORi), an international roboethics think tank hosted at University of British Columbia. Since its inception in 2012, ORi has been exploring roboethics questions in the domain of self-driving vehicles, care robots, and lethal autonomous weapons systems by taking on stakeholder-inclusive approaches to the questions. Currently, ORi is partnering with researchers and institutes globally to move forward the research and the challenges that come with the use of machine learning and robotic systems in various systems.
Shalaleh completed a Masters of Applied Science in Biomedical Engineering at UBC and specializes in understanding the role of technology in society by investigating networks of human activity. She has been involved in wide range of design projects including design of a surgical instrument for low-resource environments to the development of a user interface for shared control of a power wheelchair. She has a vested interest in engineering education and the performing arts. Her diverse experiences allow her to effectively think through multi-faceted ethical and social challenges that come with the incorporation of artificial intelligence and robotic systems within the workplace and at home.
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