BPN 1651: On the ethics and law for robots

I am fascinated by the new area opening up on the rights of robots. So far I have not thought about it that much. But it is interesting to explore the area of ethics and law for robots. This is really different ethics from the course I took at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans, La. (USA) in 1968. It looks like exploring a completely new terrain in ethics and law. It is not about ethics and law intended for humans, but do humans behave ethically over against robots and do robots have rights.

 

I have become interested in this field as my dear friend Christy Dena has been awarded Australia’s first ever digital writing residency to explore robot ethics at Queensland University of Technology's using high-end technology suites like The Cube, the world-leading, large scale, high-definition interactive display environment. She will be the creator of a project called Robot University.

 

This is the Facebook message she published today.



 

Christy Dena

Tomorrow morning (in Australia), I'll be on ABC radio talking a little about my "Robot University" project. The session is in interesting exploration of robots and their rights. The recording, and transcript, are online now.

The broadcast company ABC has put out this blur for advertising the radio broadcast:

Seattle-based Peter Remine is ready for the day when robots become so intelligent they start demanding their rights. In fact, he’s even formed an organisation in preparation for that time. It’s called the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots.

It might seem far-fetched at this stage, but robot ethics and the law is a growing field of study. It’s about their rights, it’s about our ethics and it’s also about liability.

The broadcast lasts 29 minutes and can be listened to or downloaded.

BPN 1638: Robot ethics

I could start this blog posting with a sexist sentence: she is young, she is pretty and she is smart. But from now on she will be unique for her new position in robot ethics in Australia. Dr Christy Dena has been awarded Australia’s first ever digital writing residency to explore robot ethics at Queensland University of Technology's using high-end technology suites like The Cube, the world-leading, large scale, high-definition interactive display environment. She will be the creator of a project called Robot University. Unusual is also that as a writer in residence she will be assisted by a team of technicians and artists and draw on research done for inspiration. There is a lot of expectation as she will have to take the science fiction of Asimov in six months to another level.

It is surprising and interesting to see that Dr Christy Dena has been selected. Her background could be qualified as one in digital media, ranging from cross media to transmedia. I met her at a conference in the North of Sweden in 2007, where we had a long and fierce discussion on cross-media and its implications. After that she took up an invitation to visit The Netherlands and present a guest lecture at the NHL at Leeuwarden. In 2009 she wrote her thesis on:  Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments. Superficially this could indicate a future in cross-media and more specifically in gaming. But her interest is deeper. In gaming she is confronted with robot characters, which are representations of present and future life.

Robots are becoming part of our lives. If you are really ahead of the troops you have a robot hoover or a robot grass mower at home. Employees in car factories have become familiar with robot machines. In warfare and surveillance drones are becoming more common. In research robot are used to collect for example ocean data, while in classrooms lectures are being delivered and foreign languages taught. Of course robots themselves are subject to cognitive studies. In health and medical healthcare robots are used in difficult surgical procedures.

We are presently in the phase of domestication of robot machines. They are still steered by people. But with drones the discussion has already started on the decision capability of drones; they recognise an object and start automatically to fire on it. This type of decisions leads to ethical discussions. And as robots are becoming part of our society and will assist people at the bedside, we should be sure that they harbour some good characteristics and do not start beating up slow pensionados.
 

But robots have also started to penetrate in entertainment. Besides using them for edutainment, we have seen customer robots like cuddly Furby (left) and Aibo (right) to play with. More robots have appeared in games and are used as good and bad robots, following the division of a black and white world. In this environment Dr Christy Dena will do her work. In fact she takes it as her task to challenge our perceptions of robots by exploring our responsibility to build ethical and mutually-beneficial relationships with them.

It is not entirely surprising that she as a game pro was appointed to this positio. Yet its a heavy assignment, which will be in good hands with her and worthwhile to be followed closely. Of course her mission will be really successful if the Robot University is eventually started and she becomes a professor.

My dear friend Christy Dena has just launched a crowdfunding campaign to make the finish possible for the iPAD app Authentic in all caps. It has a special page to make it easy: http://bitly.com/authenticshare  

 

BPN 1036 Vodcast by a cross/trans media expert

Yes she did it. Cross/Trans media expert Christy Dena realised a vodcast, a video podcast. The vodcast is available at UC101.com, while a large screen version of the interview is available at Blip.tv. Congratulations Christy.



It is interesting to see that YouTube has become a favourite channel for videos. You make a videoclip, you transmit it to YouTube to be mounted and you wait for your five seconds of fame. Despite the fact that Skype was available as a technology before YouTube, it has not been used as an interview medium in journalism. And I can think of many more applications with a major one of job interviews; not that you can hire someone straight after one Skype interview, but in the selection process it saves a lot of time, travel and money and gives you a better impression than a letter with a photograph or even a video, as the interview is interactive.

The vodcast with moviemaker Lance Weiler looks to me basically a Skype interview, which was recorded for the audio and video part with Skype, while the explanatory content segments were edited in later. You will see the interviewee in a large frame with the interviewer in a smaller frame in the right-hand side below. There is no change of frames. So the frame of the interviewer does not become large as in television interviews, except for the start and the conclusion of the vodcast. And the frame of the interviewer is always visible. So you see her straightening her hair and drinking from a mug during the interview.

The application is interesting from a journalistic point of view. The interviewer will not go to the house of the interviewee or to a public place to talk to each other. For a video crew no camera team has to be bussed to a place. With the Skype interview you set up a connection from your study and start the interview. Of course the preparations for the interview remain the same. And of course the editing of the interview and the material will be the same as a video interview. But over against a video camera interview a lot of time is saved in terms of travel and crew.

In the case of the Lance Weiler interview I thought that the quality of the recording was fine. Of course, the interview is not HD or television quality. But I think that you should not ask for that. You can make a glossy coffee table book for consumers, but when you deal with trade issues the paper can be of another quality. In this case the quality suffices.

Is this vodcast a good format? I definitely think that it is an exciting format. You see the persons, you see the interaction and you see content edited in. Would I like something more? Yes, I would like a transcription of the spoken text for reference. But overall I think that the first vodcast of Christy is a success and I look forwards to many more.

Just notice: this is the first embedded video link in Buziaulane! What a joy to have such a quality interview as a first.

Blog Posting Number: 1036

Tags: vodcast, podcast, cross-media

Revising crossmedia

The time of looking back and looking forward has begun again. One starts looking back over the year and the developments. In the coming days I will revisit some of the events I have been in over the last year and reflect on it, but also look forward. The first reflection will be on conference on Crossmedia and Interaction Design (CMID07) in Hemavan (Sweden).

The conference was held in a winter sports village up north. And there was snow (which I hate), but it was not even freezing cold. The timing of the conference was interesting. I had been discussing crossmedia without giving it a name with amongst others Damien Marchi (who is in 2008 starting to work for FremantleMedia), when he presented the lessons from the French Big Brother/Loft Story crossmedia production. In the Spring of 2004 I was wrestling with the definition of crossmedia, which eventually resulted in an ACTeN e-content report. The report was later on one of the contributions to the reader on e-content published by Springer Verlag. So three years later I was up North to discuss crossmedia.

And the conference did deliver some primers, valuable contacts and new insights. First of all Hemavan was the closest I had come to the North Pole. It still was no reason for me to start skiing or snowboarding. I met a group of new people. The organisers from Hemavan and Umea and a group of Nordic delegates from other institutions than I am used to. Two people made a deep impression on me as persons and my thinking about crossmedia: Christy Dena and Monique de Haas.

Christy showed the depth of the ‘discipline’ crossmedia and I am glad to see that she has stopped her blog and devotes her time to finishing her thesis in 2008; for we need a standard work on this ‘discipline’ and not the superficial articles, workshops and MBA courses touting the term crossmedia. So in 2008 I will be following Christy closely.

Monique de Haas, a compatriot, I knew only by name, as I had never met her in The Netherlands or abroad. These days she has a captive motto: Crossmedia is one big flirt. But besides using catchy phrases, she made me think about crossmedia from the user perspective. In the e-content report, I approached crossmedia from the forward production chain, not taking in consideration that in the online age interactivity had become the leading principle. So the theoretical part of sending a message to the user through various media is an element in crossmedia, but not the only one. The user is also challenged to respond through various media, using the various opportunities of the media such as a max. 196 character SMS message or a more elaborate reaction in text or by image to a blog posting.

In January 2008 I have been asked to write a new article on crossmedia for a book, which will be published by mid-2008. I have been asked to take the e-content report for departure and to integrate this with the Hemavan lecture and the conference results. This will be a nice challenge to bring three themes together: crossmedia, production chain, various media response from users and crossmedia as an instrument for regional planning.

Yet I am still convinced that crossmedia is a multi-functional, fashionable term to replace the misconceived term of multimedia, which never got any depth. I also believe that it will disappear as it is now only used for a lack of a better term. And I keep wondering why it is that the term is in use mainly in Europe (and only in some countries such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands and Belgium and Italy. There is enough material to think about in the first month of 2008, besides other assignments.

Blog Posting Number: 961

Tags: crossmedia