The Design Ethics of Autonomous Machines

In this presentation, I describe and explain why ethics has become even more salient as autonomous machines move out from factories and laboratories into the open, complex and unpredictable environment of cities. Through three different frames of ethics used to examine and evaluate autonomous machines and their interactions with people, I argue that harnessing different frames provide different resolutions to understanding the implementation of autonomous machines in cities, and furthermore, describe how the situational frame—an operative frame used in a recently concluded set of experiments—can be used to study people’s expectations of autonomous machines in ordinary but morally significant situations in public spaces. In sum, developing new frames of ethics can offer important anticipatory foresights to designers who are conceptualizing near-future social robots to be used in public spaces.

Jeffrey Chan is assistant professor in HASS. He is the author of two books, ‘Urban Ethics in the Anthropocene’, and ‘Sharing by Design’. His most recent research focuses on the ethics of human-robot interaction in public spaces.