The Ethical Engineering of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence

Robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are poised to deliver great benefits to society, but simultaneously raise significant ethical challenges. For example, autonomous and connected vehicles could significantly reduce traffic injuries, but will also enable unprecedented control over people’s movement within the larger mobility system. Machine learning will enable AI systems to vastly outperform humans in countless tasks, but could also reinforce existing social biases, thus exacerbating unjust social inequalities. The good and bad effects of technology are inextricably linked to engineering design decisions. This signals a need to empower and equip engineers to integrate ethics into their design processes as a means of anticipating, and shaping, the ethical impacts of robotics and AI on users and society. Dr. Millar will discuss some of his past and current research, which ties together philosophy and ethics, engineering practice, and policy, to support the ethical engineering of robotics and AI.

About the Speaker

Jason Millar is an Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University’s McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS), and Apple. He researches the ethical engineering of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), with a focus on developing ethically informed design methodologies for use in the design of autonomous cars, AI, and social and military robotics. Jason has a degree in engineering physics, and worked for several years as an engineer in the aerospace and telecommunications industries before turning his full-time attention to issues in applied ethics. He has authored book chapters, policy reports, and articles on the ethics and governance of robotics and AI. In 2015, Jason provided expert testimony at the United Nations CCW (Geneva) on the ethics of meaningful human control in military robots, and recently testified at the Senate Open Caucus on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (Senate of Canada). His work is regularly featured internationally in the media. He recently authored a chapter titled “Ethics Settings for Autonomous Vehicles” in Robot Ethics 2.0 (OUP), a paper in Applied Artificial Intelligence, and is co-author of chapters in Robot Law(Edward Elgar) and the Oxford Handbook on the Law and Regulation of Technology (OUP).