Computational Principles of Mobile Robotics

Ever since we began to build software systems that interacted with humans, there have ethical concerns about the ways in which we interact with them. In [830], for example, Weizenbaum observes of the world’s first chatterbot that “ELIZA shows, if nothing else, how easy it is to create and maintain the illusion of understanding, hence perhaps of judgment deserving of credibility. A certain danger lurks there.”2 Fast forward more than 60 years, and this observation that a “certain danger lurks there” has emerged as a range of different concerns about the ways in which software (and hardware) systems are developed and deployed, and the range of data that modern data-driven systems rely upon. The space of machine ethics is vast, and a large number of texts, papers, and policy documents now exist on the subject.