University of Canterbury, New Zealand
New HRI podcast episode.
I am happy to announce a new episode of the Human-Robot Interaction podcast that focuses the question why almost all social robots failed in the market. Find out more at the podcast episode.
Springer published our open access book.
Our new book entitled An Introduction to Ethics in Robotics and AI is now available under the Open Access policy of Springer. You can download the PDF directly or flip through the pages below.
An-Introduction-To-Ethics-In-Robotics-And-AI
Our paper The Morality Of Abusing A Robot has been published.
We are happy to announce that our paper “The Morality Of Abusing A Robot” has been published under the Creative Commons license at the Paladyn Journal. You can also download the PDF directly.
It is not uncommon for humans to exhibit abusive behaviour towards robots. This study compares how abusive behaviour towards a human is perceived differently in comparison with identical behaviour towards a robot. We showed participants 16 video clips of unparalleled quality that depicted different levels of violence and abuse. For each video, we asked participants to rate the moral acceptability of the action, the violence depicted, the intention to harm, and how abusive the action was. The results indicate no significant difference in the perceived morality of the actions shown in the videos across the two victim agents. When the agents started to fight back, their reactive aggressive behaviour was rated differently. Humans fighting back were seen as less immoral compared with robots fighting back. A mediation analysis showed that this was predominately due to participants perceiving the robot’s response as more abusive than the human’s response.
We created a little video to demonstrate the two main conditions of the experiment, a human or a robot being abused and then fighting back. We would like to acknowledge Jake Watson and Sam Gorski from Corridor Digital who made the stimuli for this experiment available.
New Podcast Episode on the Terrible Foundation, Turing Test and Artificial Intelligence.
I am proud to announce my new Human-Robot Interaction Podcast Episode: Artificial Artificial Intelligence. Alan Turing devised the Imitation Game as a test the intelligence of machines. This test is also used in human-robot interaction. But what happens if not a computer is trying to convince you that it is a human, but a human is trying to deceive you in thinking he is an artificial intelligence? In this episode we will discuss the Turing Test, the Zach super computer and what it means to think. I interviewed Diane Proudfoot and David Farrier about the Terrible Foundation, Turing Test and Artificial Intelligence.
New HRI Podcast episode about ATR is available.
The new HRI Podcast episode entitled “Humans and/or Robots at ATR” is now available. Here is the abstract:
The Advance Telecommunication Research Institute International in Japan is a major contributor to Human-Robot Interaction. I interview Takayuki Kanda, Michita Imai and Dylan F. Glas about their work on robots at ATR. How was Robovie developed and what is the goal of the Erika android? In two episodes we will have a closer look at the people working at ATR and the robots they created. We will also discuss what it means to work for a research lab like ATR in Japan.