Human-Robot Interaction

Racism is a major problem in our society and it is an issue from which the HRI community cannot shy away from. Several studies showed that people transfer their racial biases onto robots. In this episode we will talk about these difficult topics of racism and sexism. My guest are Kumar Yogeeswaran, Friederike Eyssel and Megan Strait. They all work on racism among humans and towards robots. Besides identifying the biases we also talk about how and if robots might be able to help reducing them.

ISSN 2703-4054

Relevant links

* Social categorization of social robots: Anthropomorphism as a function of robot group membership by Friederike Eyssel and Dieta Kuchenbrandt* Robots Racialized in the Likeness of Marginalized Social Identities are Subject to Greater Dehumanization than those racialized as White by Megan Strait, Ana Sánchez Ramos, Virginia Contreras, Noemi Garcia* Robots and racism by Christoph Bartneck, Kumar Yogeeswaran, Qi Min Ser, Graeme Woodward, Robert Sparrow, Siheng Wang, Friederike Eyssel

Addendum

In an earlier version of this post the work of Megan Strait on racism among humans and towards robots was described as “extensive”. Upon Megan’s request the qualifier “extensive” was removed.

Megan Strait would like to also note that:

I do not endorse the idea of using robots to reduce bias, as I do not find the premise to respect existing understanding and literature. If racism were readily solvable via intergroup exposure, there would not be such movement on “AI ethics” as is readily apparent in the discourse of mainstream media. With respect to combatting racism, my perspective is that robots have potential value in the role they could play in moderating of social dynamics (see, for example, Campos, Martinho, & Paiva 2018, Hoffman, Zuckerman, Hirschberger, & Shani-Sherman 2015, and Martelaro, Jung, & Hinds 2015). Applications in this manner have particular potential to address social inequities (e.g., the placement of responsibility largely on people of color to combat manifestations of racism). But that does not specifically serve toward attenuating individual and institutional bias. 

Most research at universities is done by PhD students. They are an essential part in the progress of science. The relationship between a PhD student and his or her supervisor is not unlike a marriage as Jorge Cham pointed out. It lasts for a couple of years, starts with a proposal, and culminates in a ceremony where you walk down the aisle dressed in a gown. Naïve young people enter, and around 50% end up in bitter remorse. In today’s special episode I talk to three of my former PhD students, Omar Mubin, Eduardo Sandoval, and Jakub Zlotowski, whom I met at a conference in Sydney. We talk about live during and after a PhD.

ISSN 2703-4054

Relevant Links

* The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity by The Royal Commision* The future of the postdoc by Kendall Powell* Marriage vs. the PhD by Jorge Cham

The business of creating and selling social robots is risky. Many companies have tried to sell social robots and only few have succeeded to sustain their business over a longer period of time. Aldebaran, or Softbank Robotics, as it is known today, is one of the biggest companies selling social robots to human-robot interaction researchers. Their Nao and Pepper robots are being widely used in the research community. I had the chance to talk with Amit Kumar Pandey, the head principal scientist at Softbank Robotics and Franziska Kirstein from Blue Ocean Robotics about how they develop robots.

ISSN 2703-4054

Relevant Links:

* Pepper Robot* Blue Ocean Robotics* Jibo

We continue our discussion on autonomous vehicles and focus in this episode on the legal aspects. In particular the issues around liability are a major obstacle for the wide adoption of autonomous vehicles. Who will be responsible for damages caused by auto pilots? Will it be the driver, the manufacturer of the car or maybe even the car itself? I talked with Professor Tracy Hresko Pearl, Professor Ryan Calo and Professor Alan R. Wagner about what needs to happen in our legal system to be able to deal with the liability around autonomous vehicles.

ISSN 2703-4054

Relevant Links:

* Compensation at the Crossroads: AutonomousVehicles & Alternative Victim CompensationSchemes by Tracy Pearl* Loyal Wingman Project* One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey* National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Tracy: I’m convinced that the U. S. legal system is not prepared currently to handle autonomous vehicle crash cases. So crashes that are caused by some sort of hardware software malfunction rather than by driver error.

[00:00:15] Christoph: It is alarming that the leading country in testing autonomous vehicles, is legally unprepared for this disruptive technology. Last week we already started talking about how autonomous vehicles might change our society. This week, we will try to better understand the legal and political implications that these new forms of transportation might introduce.

[00:00:48] Christoph: So what exactly is the problem in the legal system of U.S.?

[00:01:02] Tracy: We have no case law. We have very minimal statutory law. The United States right now on so, I’m concerned that the judges are going to mishandle these cases. You hand down rulings that are very unfavorable, either to industry or to consumers, and both of those would be very, very problematic. My name is Tracy Pearl, and I am a professor of law at Texas Tech University School of Law in Lubbock, Texas.

[00:01:27] Ryan: I don’t think we’re quite in a position where we should be making general laws about machine learning because I don’t think we completely understand it’s full ramifications. Well, my name is Ryan Calo. I am a law professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. I think that government should officially accrue greater expertise, for example, by refunding the Office of Technology Assessment. I’ve even argued for a standalone agency devoted to better understanding cyber physical systems.

[00:01:59] Christoph: The Office of Technology Assessment was an office off the United States Congress from 1972 to 1995. Its purpose was as the name suggests to assess what impact technology might have on society for this purpose. It provided objective analysis off the complex scientific and technical issues off the late twentieth century. Despite protests, it was defunded.

[00:02:22] Tracy: I watched the Mark Zuckerberg hearings with great interest earlier last year in United States, and I think the dynamic that you saw it play in the Senate hearings is exactly what you see in courts, which is you have younger smugger people explaining to older, more in authority people, technology that the older people really struggle to understand.

Autonomous vehicles are one of the most interesting topics in human-robot interaction right now. While they are not humanoid in shape, they are one of the biggest, deadliest and most promising robots available to the general public. They have the potential to dramatically change how we get from point a to b and what infrastructure we need. But they also raises many ethical issues besides a long list of technical challenges.

Driving a car is inherently dangerous once you drive at a practical speed. Your autonomous vehicle needs to be able to deal with all sorts of traffic situations, weather conditions and even unpredictable human operators. This is an enormous challenge.

I talked with Professor Robert Sparrow from the Monarch University, Professor Tracy Hresko Pearl and Professor Alan R. Wagner about the future of transportation with autonomous vehicles. The core question is: when will it become illegal for humans to drive cars?

ISSN 2703-4054

Relevant links:

* When human beings are like drunk robots: driverless vehicles, ethics, and the future of transport by Robert Sparrow* Compensation at the Crossroads: AutonomousVehicles & Alternative Victim CompensationSchemes by Tracy Pearl* The Moral Machine Experiment by Awad, Edmond and Dsouza, Sohan and Kim, Richard and Schulz, Jonathan and Henrich, Joseph and Shariff, Azim and Bonnefon, Jean-François and Rahwan, Iyad

Transcript:

Welcome to the human-robot interaction Podcast. I’m your host, Christophe Bartneck, and I’m fascinated with how humans and robots interact with each other. In this series we will explore this relationship with philosophers, engineers, psychologists and artists. We will look into the ethical implications off this new technology and how we can make it work for humans. We will shine light on the technologies that make robots intelligent and useful. We will also look at the people behind the science. Why are they interested in human-robot interaction? What career path did they take? And what does it mean to be a postgraduate student in this area? This is a lot of ground to cover. So let’s get started with one of the most interesting topics in human-robot interaction right now. Autonomous vehicles. While they are not human in shape they are one off the biggest, deadliest and most promising robots available to the general public. They have the potential to dramatically change how we get from point A to B and what infrastructure we need. But they also raise many ethical issues besides a long list off technical challenges In France, Germany and England, terrorists used vehicles as weapons and drove them into crowds of people, killing and injuring many. At the same time, hackers were able to remote control the Jeep Cherokee. This does raise considerable security concerns. Driving a car is inherently dangerous once you drive at a practical speed. The autonomous vehicle needs to be able to deal with all sorts of traffic situations, weather conditions and even unpredictable human operators. This is an enormous challenge. Despite the recent advances that Waymo and practically every major car manufacturer made, we did already encounter several fatalities with autonomous vehicles. In 2018 an Uber car with switched on auto pilot even killed a pedestrian crossing th...