The Emerging Policy and Ethics of Human Robot Interaction

Abstract

As robotics technology forays into our daily lives, research, industry, and government professionals in the field of human-robot interaction (HRI) in must grapple with significant ethical, legal, and normative questions. Many leaders in the field have suggested that "the time is now" to start drafting ethical and policy guidelines for our community to guide us forward into this new era of robots in human social spaces. However, thus far, discussions have been skewed toward the technology side or policy side, with few opportunities for cross-disciplinary conversation, creating problems for the community. Policy researchers can be concerned about robot capabilities that are scientifically unlikely to ever come to fruition (like the singularity), and technologists can be vehemently opposed to ethics and policy encroaching on their professional space, concerned it will impede their work. This workshop aims to build a cross-disciplinary bridge that will ensure mutual education and grounding, and has three main goals: 1) Cultivate a multidisciplinary network of scholars who might not otherwise have the opportunity to meet and collaborate, 2) Serve as a forum for guided discussion of relevant topics that have emerged as pressing ethical and policy issues in HRI, 3) Create a working consensus document for the community that will be shared broadly.