Introduction Ethics and robotics are two academic disciplines, one dealing with the moral norms and values underlying implicitly or explicitly human behaviour and the other aiming at the production of artificial agents, mostly as physical devices, with some degree of autonomy based on rules and programmes set up by their creators (Capurro and Nagenborg 2009). Since the first robots arrived on the stage in the play by Karel Čapek (1921) visions of a world inhabited by humans and robots gave rise to countless utopian and dystopian stories, songs, movies, and video games. Human-robot interaction raises serious ethical questions right now that are theoretically less ambitious but practically more important than the possibility of the creation of moral machines that would be more than machines with an ethical code. The term ‘roboethics” was coined by the engineer Gianmarco Veruggio (Veruggio 2006). The aim of this paper is give a brief account of  subjects, projects, groups and authors dealing  with ethical aspects of robots. I first start with  recent research on roboethics in two EU projects namely ETHICBOTS (2005-2008) and ETICA (2009-2011). I report on the  activities of Roboethics.org  and particularly of  the Technical Committee (TC) on  Roboethics of the IEEE  and list some ethical issues and principles currently discussed. I also report briefly on the Machine Ethics Consortium. In the second part I present some views on robotics and robots as discussed particularly in Japan leading to what I call intercultural roboethics, i.e., to an in-deep analysis of the way(s) in which robots are perceived in different cultures with different social and moral backgrounds, values and principles. An intercultural ethical analysis should make possible to be aware of these differences as a basis for a comparative normative ethics of robots (genitivus obiectivus) that is still in its infancy (Capurro and Nagenborg 2009). In the third part I briefly discuss the relationship between roboethics and digital ontology. In the conclusion I point to some topics and questions for a future agenda of intercultural roboethics. In the Annexes I list recent conferences and publications in the field. I refer to the Korean Robot Ethics Charter as well as to Asimov's Laws of Robotics.   I. Recent Research on Roboethics 1. EU Project ETHICBOTS (2005-2008) Emerging Technoethics of Human Interaction with Communication, Bionic and Robotic Systems (2005-2008). The project aimed at identifying crucial ethical issues in these areas such as the preservation of human identity, and integrity applications of precautionary principles economic and social discrimination; artificial system autonomy and accountability; responsibilities for (possibly unintended) warfare application nature and impact of human-machine cognitive and affective bonds on individuals and society. Following issues were analyzed Human-softbot integration, as achieved by AI research on information and communication technologies; Human-robot, non-invasive integration, as achieved by robotic research on autonomous systems inhabiting human environments; Physical, invasive integration, as achieved by bionic research. For an analysis of some epistemological, ontological and psychoanalytic implications of robots as contribution to this project see my Ethics and Robotics as well as the complete documentation in the ETHICBOTS website. 2. EU Project ETICA (2009-2011) “The ETICA project will identify emerging Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their potential application areas in order to analyse and evaluate ethical issues arising from these. By including a variety of stakeholders and disciplinary perspectives, it will grade and rank foreseeable ethical risks. Based on the study governance arrangements currently used to address ICT ethics in Europe, ETICA will recommend concrete governance structures to address the most salient ethical issues identified. These recommendations will form the basis of more general policy recommendations aimed at addressing ethical issues in emerging ICTs before or as they arise. Taking an inclusive and interdisciplinary approach will ensure that ethical issues are identified early, recommendations will be viable and acceptable, and relevant policy suggestions will be developed. This will contribute to the larger aims of the Science in Society programme by developing democratic and open governance of ICT. Given the high importance of ICT to further a number of European policy goals, it is important that ethical issues are identified and addressed early. The provision of viable policy suggestions will have an impact well beyond the scientific community. Ethical issues have the potential to jeopardise the success of individual technical solutions. The acceptance of the scientific-technological basis of modern society requires that ethical questions are addressed openly and transparently. The ETICA project is therefore a contribution to the European Research Area and also to the quality of life of European citizens. Furthermore, ethical awareness can help the European ICT industry gain a competitive advantage over less sensitive competitors, thus contributing to the economic well-being of Europe.” (ETICA) ETICA is funded by the European Commission under the 7th framework programme.   3.  Roboethics.org Technical Committee on Roboethics "The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a non-profit organization, is the world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology. The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) is interested in both applied and theoretical issues in robotics and automation. The IEEE-RAS Technical Committee (TC) on Roboethics aims to provide the IEEE-RAS with a framework for analyzing the ethical implications of robotics research, by promoting the discussion among researchers, philosophers, ethicists, and manufacturers, but also by supporting the establishment of shared tools for managing ethical issues in this context. The IEEE-RAS Technical Committee on Roboethics was founded in 2004. Co-Chairs: Gianmarco Veruggio, Ronald Arkin, Atsuo Takanishi. Founding Co-Chairs: Paolo Dario, Ronald Arkin, Kazuo Tanie." Scope of the TC: "The focus of the TC includes the unintended warfare uses of robotics research results, the preservation of human integrity in the interaction with robotic (even bionic) systems, and the study and development of the robot-ethics concept. The TC pursues its objectives by organizing focussed events and publications at RAS-sponsored conferences and elsewhere." Taxonomy: Humanoids Advanced production systems Adaptive robot servants and intelligent homes Network Robotics Outdoor Robotics Health Care and Life Quality Military Robotics Edutainment See  more here Ethical issues shared by Roboethics and Information Ethics: Dual-use technology Anthropomorphization of the Machines Humanisation of the Human/Machine relationship Technology Addiction Digital Devide Fair access to technological resources Effects of technology on the global distribution of wealth and powr Environmental impact of technology See more here. Ethical Principles to be followed in Roboethics: Human Dignity and Human Rights Equality, Justice and Equity Benefit and Harm Respect for Cultural Diversity and Pluralism Non-Discrimination and Non-Stigmatization Autonomy and Individual Responsibility Informed Consent Privacy Confidentiality Solidarity and Cooperation Social Responsibility Sharing of Benefits Responsibility towards the Biosphere See more here. 4. The first joint EURON/EUROP Annual Meeting - a success story March 2010 During the third day organised by EURON, the workshops were targeted more towards academia, nevertheless of interest for the EUROP community as well. In particular, the sessions on Ethical, Legal and Societal issues / non-technical constraints, and on State-of-the-art robotics products and R&D challenges were organised by EUROP members. Ethical, Lecal and Social issues: non-technical constraints. 5.  Machine Ethics Consortium (Univ. of Hartford) “Machine Ethics is concerned with the behavior of machines towards human users and other machines. Allowing machine intelligence to effect change in the world can be dangerous without some restraint. Machine Ethics involves adding an ethical dimension to machines to achieve this restraint. Further, machine intelligence can be harnessed to develop and test the very theory needed to build machines that will be ethically sensitive. Thus, machine ethics has the additional benefits of assisting human beings in ethical decision-making and, more generally, advancing the development of ethical theory.” Projects: Implementing Ethical Advisors "In order to add an ethical dimension to machines, we need to have an ethical theory that can be implemented. Looking to Philosophy for guidance, we find that ethical decision-making is not an easy task. It requires finding a single principle or set of principles to guide our behavior with which experts in Ethics are satisfied and will likely involve generalizing from intuitions about particular cases, testing those generalizations on other cases and, above all, making sure that principles generated are consistent with one another. We are developing prototype systems based upon action-based ethical theories that provide guidance in ethical decision-making according to the precepts of their respective theories— Jeremy , based upon Bentham's Hedonistic Act Utilitarianism, W.D., based upon Ross' Theory of Prima Facie Duties, and MedEthEx, based upon Beauchamp's and Childress' Principles of Biomedical Ethics.  MedEthEx (see online demo) uses an ethical principle discovered via machine learning techniques to give advice in a particular type of ethical dilemma in medical ethics." Machine Ethics Research Group "We are working on advancing Ethical Theory by making ethics precise enough to be programmed. We are, also, working on the problem of developing a decision procedure for determining the correct action in a multiple duty ethical theory such as W.D. Ross' Theory of Prima Facie Duties. Since we believe that such a decision procedure will come from abstracting from intuitions about particular cases, we are developing a database of ethical dilemmas and analyzing them according to Ross' theory." 6. LIREC Living with Robots and Interactive Companions (FP 7)   Preparatory Studies and Ethics for Companion Design (LIREC Deliverable D10.1) The research questions in WP10 are: - How can we understand how to design for long-term human companions? - How can methods and techniques from interaction design inform human companion design? - What are the ethics involved in designing companions?   7. Robot Companions for Citiziens II. Intercultural Roboethics There have been recent discussions about the social and ethical dimensions of robotics and robots in different societies and cultures. I take as an example the case of Japan. 1. Robots and Roboethics in Japan: "Robots that look human tend to be a big hit with young children and the elderly," Hiroshi Kobayashi, Tokyo University of Science professor and Saya's developer, said yesterday. "Children even start crying when they are scolded." "Simply turning our grandparents over to teams of robots abrogates our society's responsibility to each other, and encourages a loss of touch with reality for this already mentally and physically challenged population," Kobayashi said Noel Sharkey, robotics expert and professor at the University of Sheffield, believes robots can serve as an educational aid in inspiring interest in science, but they can't replace humans. Kobayashi says Saya is just meant to help people and warns against getting hopes up too high for its possibilities. "The robot has no intelligence. It has no ability to learn. It has no identity," he said. "It is just a too." Source here. TOKYO (Reuters) - Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in graying Japan by 2025, a thinktank says, helping to avert worker shortages as the country's population shrinks. Japan faces a 16 percent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the government estimates, raising worries about who will do the work in a country unused to, and unwilling to contemplate, large-scale immigration. The thinktank, the Machine Industry Memorial Foundation, says robots could help fill the gaps, ranging from microsized capsules that detect lesions to high-tech vacuum cleaners Rather than each robot replacing one person, the foundation said in a report that robots could make time for people to focus on more important things.“ (Source here.) What kind of „more important things“? This is a question to intercultural roboethics.. „Japan could save 2.1 trillion yen ($21 billion) of elderly insurance payments in 2025 by using robots that monitor the health of older people, so they don't have to rely on human nursing care, the foundation said in its report. What are the consequences for relying on robot nursing? This is a question to intercultural roboethics.  "Caregivers would save more than an hour a day if robots helped look after children, older people and did some housework, it added. Robotic duties could include reading books out loud or helping bathe the elderly.“ How will children and elderly react to robots taking „care“ of them? This is a question to intercultural roboethics. "Seniors are pushing back their retirement until they are 65 years old, day care centers are being built so that more women can work during the day, and there is a move to increase the quota of foreign laborers. But none of these can beat the shrinking workforce," said Takao Kobayashi, who worked on the study. "Robots are important because they could help in some ways to alleviate such shortage of the labor force."   How far will they alleviate such shortage of the labor force? And with what consequences? This is a question to intercultural roboethics. "Kobayashi said change was still needed for robots to make a big impact on the workforce." "There's the expensive price tag, the functions of the robots still need to improve, and then there are the mindsets of people," he said. "People need to have the will to use the robots." The „mindsets of people“ and their interplay with robots: this is  a question to intercultural roboethics 2. Further Contributions See my presentations in 2009 for the following workshops at the University of Tsukuba organized by Makoto Nakada: Symposium: Ethics and Robotics, University of Tsukuba, October 3, 2009 (PowerPoint) Cybernics, University of Tsukuba, September 30, 2009 (PowerPoint) See also the contributions to the meeting Computing and Philosophy (AP-CAP 2009) Keynote: Hiroshi Ishiguro: Developing androids and understanding humans Carl Shulman, Nick Tarleton, and Henrik Jonsson: Which Consequentialism? Machine Ethics and Moral Divergence Kimura Takeshi: Introducing Roboethics to Japanese Society: A Proposal  Soraj Hongladarom: An Ethical Theory for Autonomous and Conscious Robots Carl Shulman, Enrik Johnsson, and Nick Tarleton: Machine Ethics and Supertintelligence Keitz Miller, Frances Grodzinsky, Marty Wolf: Why Turing Shouldn’t Have to Guess Gene Rohrbaugh: On the Design of Moral and Amoral Agents III. Roboethics and Digital Ontology The relation between humans and robots can be understood as a relation between rationality and freedom or between the digital and the existential casting of Being. In a recent article the Australian philosopher Michael Eldred writes: "For example, a computer-controlled robot on a production line can bring the robot's arm into a precisely precalculated position, which is always a rational number or an n-tuple thereof. The robot's arm, however, will always be in a real, physical position, no matter how accurate the rational position calculated by the computer is. There is therefore always an /indeterminacy/ in the computer-calculated position, a certain /quivering/ between a rational position and an infinity of irrational, but real positions. An irrational, real position can never be calculated by a computer, but only approximated, only approached. This signals the /ontological/ limit to the calculability of physical reality for mathematical science. It is not an experimental result, but is obtained from phenomenological, ontological considerations. We must conclude: /physical reality is irrational/. " "Hence the state of any real physical being is always an indeterminate quivering around a rationally calculable state. Physical reality, even on a banal macroscopic level, therefore always exceeds what can be logically, mathematically, rationally calculated/. This holds true all the more for those physical beings — ourselves— whose essential hallmark is spontaneous, /free/ movement. Let me end therefore with a quote from Goethe: "Es waren verständige, geistreiche, lebhafte Menschen, die wohl einsahen, daß die Summe unserer Existenz, durch Vernunft dividiert, niemals rein aufgehe, sondern daß immer ein wunderlicher Bruch übrig bleibe." ("They were rational, clever, lively people who saw very well that the sum of our existence, divided by reason, never goes evenly, but always leaves the remainder of a queer fraction." (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 4. Buch, 18. Kap.)." (Eldred 2010) There is not only a tension but an abyss or a "queer" fraction ("ein wunderlicher Bruch") between the human mode of existence and the mode robots are. Humans die, robots break down or go kaput. This insight is important not only for philosophers but also for roboticists in order to avoid waste of time for instance trying to build a robot like a human or to develop a theory where robots are to be considered as moral beings. This analysis of the ontological difference between the modes of being of robots and humans presupposes what I call, in accordance with Eldred, digital ontology (Capurro 2005). The consequence of this analysis is that robotics should be founded in the difference and not in the similarity between the modes of being of humans and robots. This analysis takes a critical stance against some perennial myths regarding the idea of robots becoming "like" humans. Conclusion If within our present digital ontology – in case we agree that this view of Being is a pervading one today, as Eldred also remarks – leads us to equating all beings (including humans) as being digitally quantifiable and re-producible, then it is an important philosophical, i.e., critical or ethical task to question these metaphysical ambitions that blur phenomenological differences. Digital reductionism is not bad per se but only when it becomes dogmatic in theory and/or in practice. What is the difference between a “program” and an "agent"? Michael Nagenborg writes: „One major difference between a „program“ and an „agent“ is, that programs are designed as tools to be used by human beings, while „agents“ are designed to interact as partners with human beings. […] An AMA [artificial moral agent, RC] is an AA [artificial agent, RC] guided by norms which we as human beings consider to have a moral content. […] Agents may be guided by a set of moral norms, which the agent itself may not change, or they are capable of creating and modifying rules by themselves. […] Thus, there must be questioning about what kind of „morality“ will be fostered by AMAs, especially since now norms and values are to be embedded consciously into the „ethical subroutines“. Will they be guided by „universal values“, or will they be guided by specific Western or African concepts.“ (Nagenborg 2007, 2-3) The concepts of autonomy, learning, decision etc. are analogies of the human agent deprived of its historical, political, societal, bodily and existential dimensions. A moral code programmed in a microprocessor has nothing in common with the capacity of practical reflexion even in case there is a feed-back that mimic (human) theoretical and/or practical reason. The evaluation and ‘decisions’ coming out of such programmes remain lastly dependent on the programmer himself. It is cynical to speculate and to spend public funds on the supposed creation of artificial agents towards whom we would be morally (and legally) responsible (and vice versa!) given the present situation of some six billion human beings on this planet and the lack of such responsibility towards them. We might say that artificial agents are only prima facie agents. They are basically patients of human agency. They will surely breakdown (Winograd and Flores 1986; Flores Morador 2009). In contrast, the question of what kind of transformation is being operated in human societies when billions of human beings interact in digital networks that are interwoven with their bodies is highly relevant today and in the future. If roboticists want to create useful robots they have to think about them within the background of different cultures and moralities. “What is it like to be a robot? Wittgenstein’s famous dictum that “if a lion could speak, we would not understand him” (Wittgenstein, 1984, p. 568) points to the issue, that human language is rooted in what he calls “forms of life.” Humans and lions have orthogonal forms of life, i.e., they construct their reality based on systemic differences. What is it like to be a human?” (Capurro & Nagenborg 2009) Roboethics means ethics of robots (genitivus objectivus) not ethics of robots (genitivus subjectivus). Bibliography Anderson, Michael & Anderson, Susan Leigh: Machine ethics: Creating an ethical intelligent agent. AI Magazine | December 22, 2007. Capurro, Rafael (2010). Towards a Comparative Theory of Agents  Capurro, Rafael (2007): Ethics and Robotics Capurro, Rafael (2005). Towards an ontological foundation of information ethics Capurro, Rafael and Nagenborg, Michael (Eds.) (2009), Introduction. In: ibid.: Ethics and Robotics. Berlin: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft. Cerqui, Daniela; Weber, Jutta; Weber, Karsten (Guest Editors) (2006): Ethics in Robotics, International Review of Information Ethics Eldred, Michael (2010). Digital Being, the Real Continuum, the Rational and the Irrational ETHICBOTS (2009). ETICA (2010)  Gates, Bill (2007). Roboter für jedermann  Flores Morador, Fernando (2009). Broken Technologies. The Humanist as Engineer. University of Lund. Floridi, L. and Sanders, J.W. (2004). On the Morality of Artificial Agents. In: Minds and Machines, 14, 3, 349-379. Nagenborg, Michael (2007). Artificial moral agents: an intercultural perspective. In: International Review of Inforamtion Ethics:  Shim, H.B. (2007). Establishing a Korean Robot Ethics Charter.  Veruggio, Gianmarco & Operto, Fiorella: Roboethics: Social and Ethical Implications. In:  Bruno Siciliano & Oussama Khatib (Eds.): Handbook of Robotics. Springer 2008, Part G, pp. 1499-1524. Veruggio, Gianmarco (2006): EURON Roboethics Roadmap. Wallach, Wendell & Allen, Colin (2009). Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from  Wrong. Oxford University Press. Winograd,  Terry and Flores, Fernando (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition. Ablex, NJ. 1986. Annex 1: Conferences and Workshops   AAAI 2005 Symposium on Machine Ethics   “Past research concerning the relationship between technology and ethics has largely focused on responsible and irresponsible use of technology by human beings, with a few people being interested in how human beings ought to treat machines. In all cases, only human beings have engaged in ethical reasoning. The time has come for adding an ethical dimension to at least some machines. Recognition of the ethical ramifications of behavior involving machines, as well as recent and potential developments in machine autonomy, necessitates this. In contrast to computer hacking, software property issues, privacy issues and other topics normally ascribed to computer ethics, machine ethics is concerned with the behavior of machines towards human users and other machines. We contend that research in machine ethics is key to alleviating concerns with autonomous systems—it could be argued that the notion of autonomous machines without such a dimension is at the root of all fear concerning machine intelligence. Further, investigation of machine ethics could enable the discovery of problems with current ethical theories, advancing our thinking about ethics. We intend to bring together interested participants from a wide variety of disciplines to the end of forging a set of common goals for machine ethics investigation and the research agendas required to accomplish them.” Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to the following: Improvement of interaction between artificially and naturally intelligent systems through the addition of an ethical dimension to artificially intelligent systems  Enhancement of machine-machine communication and cooperation through an ethical dimension Design of systems that provide expert guidance in ethical matters Deeper understanding of ethical theories through computational simulation Development of decision procedures for ethical theories that have multiple prima facie duties Computability of ethics Theoretical and practical objections to machine ethics Impact of machine ethics on society   ECAP (European Computing and Philosophy) 2007   European Computing and Philosophy Conference, Enschede, The Netherlands, 2007: Philosophy and Ethics of Robotics G. Veruggio: Roboethics: an interdisciplinary approach to the social implications of Robotics Ishii Kayoko: Can a Robot Intentionally Conduct Mutual Interactions with Human Beings Ronald C. Arkin: On the Ethical Quandaries of Practicing Roboticist: A First Hand Look Jutta Weber: Analysing Material, Semiotic and Socio-Political Dimensions of Artificial Agents Daniel Persson: Ethics of Intelligent Systems – Artefacts, Producers and Users Merel Noorman: Exploring the Limits to the Autonomy of Artificial Agents Susana Nascimento: Autonomous Anthropomorphisms: Robot Narratives and Critical Social Theories Peter Asaro: How Just Could A Robot War Be? Edward H. Spence: Robot Rights: The Moral Life of Androids Workshop on Roboethics, ICRA 2009, Kobe, 2009 Social (Robotics and job market; Cost benefit analysis etc.) Psychological (Robots and kids; Robots and elderly, etc.) Legal (Robots and liability, Identification of autonomously acting robots etc.) Medical (Robots in health care and prosthesis etc.) Warfare application of robotics (Responsibility, International Conventiuons and Laws etc.) Environment (Cleaning nuclear and toxic waste, Using renewable energies, etc.) SPT (Society for Philosophy and Technology) 2009 Mark Coeckelbergh: Living with Robots Aimee van Wynsberghe: What Care Robots say about Care Susana Nascimento: Self-operating Machines and (Dis)engagement in Human Technical Actions Allan Hanson: Beyond the Skin Bag: On the Moral Responsibility of Extended Agencies Scott Sehon: Robots and Free will Peter Asaro: The Convergence of Video Games & Military Robotics Martintje Smits: Social Robots: How to bridge the Gap Between Fantasies and Practices? Helena De Preester: The (Im)possibilities of Reembodim Guido Nicolosi: Restless Creatures Gianmarco Veruggio: Ethical, Legal and Societal Issues in the Strategic Agenda for Robotics in Europe  AP-CAP 2009 Keynote: Hiroshi Ishiguro: Developing androids and understanding humans Carl Shulman, Nick Tarleton, and Henrik Jonsson: Which Consequentialism? Machine Ethics and Moral Divergence Kimura Takeshi: Introducing Roboethics to Japanese Society: A Proposal  Soraj Hongladarom: An Ethical Theory for Autonomous and Conscious Robots Carl Shulman, Enrik Johnsson, and Nick Tarleton: Machine Ethics and Supertintelligence Keitz Miller, Frances Grodzinsky, Marty Wolf: Why Turin Shoudn’t Have to Guess Gene Rohrbaugh: On the Design of Moral and Amoral Agents The first joint EURON/EUROP Annual Meeting - a success story March 2010 During the third day organised by EURON, the workshops were targeted more towards academia, nevertheless of interest for the EUROP community as well. In particular, the sessions on Ethical, Legal and Societal issues / non-technical constraints, and on State-of-the-art robotics products and R&D challenges were organised by EUROP members. Ethical, Legal and Social issues: non-technical constraints. Annex 2: Korean Robot Ethics Charter Shim, H.B. (2007). Establishing a Korean Robot Ethics Charter. Lovgren, Stefan (2007). Robot Code of Ethics to Prevent Android Abuse, Protect Humans. National Geographic News: "The government of South Korea is drawing up a code of ethics to prevent human abuse of robots—and vice versa. The so-called Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for robotics users and manufacturers, as well as guidelines on ethical standards to be programmed into robots, South Korea's Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy announced last week. (...) Abusing Robots South Korea boasts one of the world's most high-tech societies. The country's Ministry of Information and Communication is working on plans to put a robot in every South Korean household by 2020. The new charter is part of an effort to establish ground rules for human interaction with robots in the future. "Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives," Park Hye-Young of the ministry's robot team told the AFP news agency. (...) Laws of Robotics The South Korean charter, which may include guidelines for the robots themselves, could be seen as a nod to Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics. Familiar to many science-fiction fans, the laws were first put forward by the late sci-fi author in his short story "Runaround" in 1942. The laws state that robots may not injure humans or, through inaction, allow humans to come to harm; robots must obey human orders unless they conflict with the first law; and robots must protect themselves if this does not conflict with the other laws. Robot researchers, however, say that Asimov's laws—and the South Korean charter—belong in the realm of science-fiction and are not yet applicable to their field. "While I applaud the Korean effort to establish a robot ethics charter, I fear it might be premature to use Asimov's laws as a starter," said Mark Tilden, the designer of RoboSapiens, a toylike robot. "From experience, the problem is that giving robots morals is like teaching an ant to yodel. We're not there yet, and as many of Asimov's stories show, the conundrums robots and humans would face would result in more tragedy than utility," said Tilden, who works for Wow Wee Toys in Hong Kong." From Wikipedia Three laws of robotics "In science fiction, the Three Laws of Robotics are a set of three rules written by Isaac Asimov, which almost all positronic robots appearing in his fiction must obey. Introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround", although foreshadowed in a few earlier stories, the Laws state the following: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law (...) Zeroth Law added Asimov once added a "Zeroth Law"—so named to continue the pattern of lower-numbered laws superseding in importance the higher-numbered laws—stating that a robot must not merely act in the interests of individual humans, but of all humanity. (...)         A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. (...) Asimov addresses the problem of humanoid robots ("androids" in later parlance) several times. The novel Robots and Empire and the short stories "Evidence" and "The Tercentenary Incident" describe robots crafted to fool people into believing that the robots are human. On the other hand, "The Bicentennial Man" and "—That Thou art Mindful of Him" explore how the robots may change their interpretation of the Laws as they grow more sophisticated. (Gwendoline Butler writes in A Coffin for the Canary, "Perhaps we are robots. Robots acting out the last Law of Robotics... To tend towards the human.") "—That Thou art Mindful of Him", which Asimov intended to be the "ultimate" probe into the Laws' subtleties, finally uses the Three Laws to conjure up the very Frankenstein scenario they were invented to prevent. It takes as its concept the growing development of robots that mimic non-human living things, and are therefore given programs that mimic simple animal behaviours and do not require the Three Laws. The presence of a whole range of robotic life that serves the same purpose as organic life ends with two humanoid robots concluding that organic life is an unnecessary requirement for a truly logical and self-consistent definition of "humanity", and that since they are the most advanced thinking beings on the planet, they are therefore the only two true humans alive and the Three Laws only apply to themselves. The story ends on a sinister note as the two robots enter hibernation and await a time when they conquer the Earth and subjugate biological humans to themselves, an outcome they consider an inevitable result of the "Three Laws of Humanics". This story does not fit within the overall sweep of the Robot and Foundation series; if the George robots did take over Earth some time after the story closes, the later stories would be either redundant or impossible. Contradictions of this sort among Asimov's fiction works have led scholars to regard the Robot stories as more like "the Scandinavian sagas or the Greek legends" than a unified whole. Indeed, Asimov describes "—That Thou art Mindful of Him" and "Bicentennial Man" as two opposite, parallel futures for robots that obviate the Three Laws by robots coming to consider themselves to be humans — one portraying this in a positive light with a robot joining human society, one portraying this in a negative light with robots supplanting humans. Both are to be considered alternatives to the possibility of a robot society that continues to be driven by the Three Laws as portrayed in the Foundation series. Indeed, in the novelization of "Bicentennial Man", Positronic Man, Asimov and his cowriter Robert Silverberg imply that in the future where Andrew Martin exists, his influence causes humanity to abandon the idea of independent, sentient humanlike robots entirely, creating an utterly different future from that of Foundation. (...) "The Fifth Law of Robotics" A robot must know it is a robot The Fifth Law was introduced by Nikola Kesarovski in his short story "The Fifth Law of Robotics". The plot revolves around a murder. The forensic investigation discovers that the victim was killed from a hug by a humaniform robot. The robot violated both the First and the Fourth Laws because it did not establish for itself that it was a robot. (...) In the July/August 2009 issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems, Robin Murphy and David D. Woods proposed "The Three Laws of Responsible Robotics": A human may not deploy a robot without the human-robot work system meeting the highest legal and professional standards of safety and ethics. A robot must respond to humans as appropriate for their roles. A robot must be endowed with sufficient situated autonomy to protect its own existence as long as such protection provides smooth transfer of control which does not conflict with the First and Second Laws." Annex 3: Recent Publications Capurro, Rafael and Nagenborg, Michael (Eds.): Ethics and Robotics. Heidelberg: Akad.Verlagsgesellschaft 2009 (ISBN 978-3-89838-087-4 (AKA) and 978-1-60750-008-7 (IOS Press) P. M. Asaro: What should We Want from a Robot Ethic? G. Tamburrini: Robot Ethics: A View from the Philosophy of Science B. Becker: Social Robots - Emotional Agents: Some Remarks on Naturalizing Man-machine Interaction E. Datteri, G. Tamburrini: Ethical Reflections on Health Care Robotics P. Lin, G. Bekey, K. Abney: Robots in War: Issues of Risk and Ethics J. Altmann: Preventive Arms Control for Uninhabited Military Vehicles J. Weber: Robotic warfare, Human Rights & The Rhetorics of Ethical Machines T. Nishida: Towards Robots with Good Will R. Capurro: Ethics and Robotics  Cerqui, Daniela, Weber, Jutta and Weber, Karsten (Guest Editors): Ethics in Robotics International Review of Information Ethics (IRIE 2006)  “This issue is a very special issue. What it makes so special is the fact that we faced some of the issues dealt in it in the process of creating it: some contributions sent in by Email were blocked by the spam mail scanner. They were - of course wrongly - tagged as 'sexual discriminating' but no alert was given by the system. Now: who was to be made responsible if we - in fact in an uncomplicated und constructive thus human way - would not have fixed the problem in time and the authors would not have been included in the issue? On which grounds did the software decide to block them and thus can it be taken as a moral agent? And finally, is the phenomenon of spam forcing us to use such agents in our social communication on which we have to rely in various ways? There we are amidst the subject of our current issue: Ethics in Robotics. Gianmarco Veruggio and Fiorella Operto: Roboethics: a Bottom-up Interdisciplinary Discourse in the Field of Applied Ethics in Robotics Peter M. Asaro: What Should We Want From a Robot Ethic?  John P. Sullins: When is a Robot a Moral Agent?  Brian R. Duffy: Fundamental Issues in Social Robotics  Barbara Becker: Social Robots - Emotional Agents: Some Remarks on Naturalizing Man-Machine Interaction  Dante Marino and Guglielmo Tamburrini: Learning Robots and Human Responsibility  C.K.M. Crutzen: Invisibility and the Meaning of Ambient Intelligence  Stefan Krebs: On the Anticipation of Ethical Conflicts between Humans and Robots in Japanese Mangas  Karen Kraehling: In Between Companion and Cyborg: The Double Diffracted Being Else-where of a Robodog  Naho Kitano: 'Rinri': An Incitement towards the Existence of Robots in Japanese Society  Miguel Angel Pérez Alvarez: Robotics and Development of Intellectual Abilities in Children  Dirk Söffker and Jutta Weber: On Designing Machines and Technologies in the 21st Century. An Interdisciplinary Dialogue Murphy, Robert and Woods, David: Beyond Asimov the Three Laws of Responsible Robotics. In: Intelligent Systems, July/August 2009, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 14-20 Abstract: "Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics have been inculcated so successfully into our culture that they now appear to shape expectations as to how robots should act around humans. However, there has been little serious discussion as to whether the Laws really do provide a framework for human-robot interactions. Asimov actually used his laws as a literary device to explore the lack of resilience in the interplay between people and robots in a range of situations. This paper briefly reviews some of the practical shortcomings of each of Asimov's Laws for framing the relationships between people and robots, including reminders about what robots can't do. The main focus of the paper is to propose an alternative, parallel set of Laws of Responsible Robotics as a means to stimulate debate about the accountability relationships for robots when their actions can result in harm to people or human interests. The alternative laws emphasize (1) systems safety in terms of the responsibilities of those who develop and deploy robotic systems, (2) robots' responsiveness as they participate in dynamic social and cognitive relationships, and (3) smooth transfer of control as a robot encounters and initially responds to disruptions, impasses, or opportunities in context." See: Pam Frost Gorder: Want Responsible Robotics? Start with Responsible Humans. In: Research News. The Ohio State University, 2009 Sharkey, Noel: The Ethical Frontiers of Robotics. Science, Dec. 19, 2008 " (...) What would happen if a parent were to leave a child in the safe hands of a future robot caregiver almost exclusively? The truth is that we do not know what the effects of the long-term exposure of infants would be. We cannot conduct controlled experiments on children to find out the consequences of long-term bonding with a robot, but we can get some indication from early psychological work on maternal deprivation and attachment. Studies of early development in monkeys have shown that severe social dysfunction occurs in infant animals allowed to develop attachments only to inanimate surrogates Despite these potential problems, no international or national legislation or policy guidelines exist except in terms of negligence, which has not yet been tested in court for robot surrogates and may be difficult to prove in the home (relative to cases of physical abuse). There is no guidance from any international Nanny code of ethics, nor even from the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Children (7) except by inference. There is a vital need for public discussion to decide the limits of robot use before the industry and busy parents make the decision themselves. At the other end of the age spectrum, the relative increase in many countries in the population of the elderly relative to available younger caregivers has spurred the development of sophisticated elder-care robots. Examples include the Secom "My Spoon" automatic feeding robot, the Sanyo electric bathtub robot that automatically washes and rinses, and the Mitsubishi Wakamura robot for monitoring, delivering messages, and reminding about medicine. These robots can help the elderly to maintain independence in their own homes (8), but their presence could lead to the risk of leaving the elderly in the exclusive care of machines. The elderly need the human contact that is often only provided by caregivers and people performing day-to-day tasks for them (9). (...) A different set of ethical issues is raised by the use of robots in military applications. Coalition military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have deployed more than 5000 mobile robots. Most are used for surveillance or bomb disposal, but some, like the Talon SWORD and MAARS, are heavily armed for use in combat, although there have been no reports of lethality yet. The semiautonomous unmanned combat air vehicles, such as the MQ1 Predator and MQ9 Reapers, carry Hellfire missiles and bombs that have been involved in many strikes against insurgent targets that have resulted in the deaths of many innocents, including children. (...) Robot autonomy is required because one soldier cannot control several robots. The ethical problems arise because no computational system can discriminate between combatants and innocents in a close-contact encounter. Computer programs require a clear definition of a noncombatant, but none is available. (...) Robots for care and for war represent just two of many ethically problematic areas that will soon arise from the rapid increase and spreading diversity of robotics applications. Scientists and engineers working in robotics must be mindful of the potential dangers of their work, and public and international discussion is vital in order to set policy guidelines for ethical and safe application before the guidelines set themselves." Wallach, Wendell and Allen, Collin: Moral Machines. Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. Oxford 2009 “Three questions emerge naturally from the discussion so far. Does the world need AMAs? Do people want computers making moral decisions? And if people believe that computers making moral decisions are necessary or inevitable, how should engineers and philosophers proceed to design AMAs?“(Introd.) „We take the instrumental approach that while full-blown moral agency may be beyond the current or future technology, there is nevertheless much space between operational morality and “genuine” moral agency. This is the niche we identified as functional morality in chapter 2.“(Introd.) „The top-down and bottom-up approaches emphasize the importance in ethics of the ability to reason. However, much of the recent empirical literature on moral psychology emphasizes faculties besides rationality. Emotions, sociability, semantic understanding, and consciousness are all important to human moral decision making, but it remains an open question whether these will be essential to AMAs, and if so, whether they can be implemented in machines.“ (Introd.) „The field of machine morality extends the field of computer ethics beyond concern for what people do with their computers to questions about what the machines do by themselves. (In this book we will use the terms ethics and morality interchangeably.)  We are discussing the technological issues involved in making computers themselves into explicit moral reasoners.“ (Introd.) Last update: January 30, 2012