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In this essay an engineer and a philosopher, after many conversations, develop an argument for why the Aristotelian version of virtue ethics is the most promising way to develop what we call artificial moral, social agents, i.e. robots. This, evidently, applies to humans as well. There are several claims: first, that humans are not born moral, they are socialized into morality; second, that morality involves affect, emotion, feeling, before it engages reason; third, that how a moral being feels is related to some narrative, whether moral or not; and finally, that narrativity is what builds a sense of a "moral" I, namely an authorial moral self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous types of robots are being interwoven into the health-care system, including rehabilitative devices for use with pediatric populations. Yet a key ethical concern is that pediatric patients, their parents, and other caregivers might begin to overtrust robotic technology, possibly resulting in a patient being harmed or the technology adopted prematurely. To gain insight into the issue, our research team conducted a study examining the potential of overtrust in pediatric robotics. This article discusses results from a survey of parents who have at least one child with a movement disability. The survey's focus is on robotic exoskeletons, which represent the most viable of the currently available robotic technologies in terms of being adopted into the home as a clinically validated rehabilitative device for both adults and children. More than 62% of respondents indicated they would typically or completely trust their child to handle risky situations with an exoskeleton, even though the technology may not be designed for such situations. We conclude with suggestions for future research directions on the problem of overtrust in health-care robotics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses verification and validation (V&V) of autonomous systems, a concept that will prove to be difficult for systems that were designed to execute decision initiative. V&V of such systems should include evaluations of the trustworthiness of the system based on transparency inputs and scenariobased training. Transparency facets should be used to establish shared awareness and shared intent among the designer, tester, and user of the system. The transparency facets will allow the human to understand the goals, social intent, contextual awareness, task limitations, analytical underpinnings, and team-based orientation of the system in an attempt to verify its trustworthiness. Scenario-based training can then be used to validate that programming in a variety of situations that test the behavioral repertoire of the system. This novel method should be used to analyze behavioral adherence to a set of governing principles coded into the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the challenge of developing a robot capable of determining if a social situation demands trust. Solving this challenge may allow a robot to react when a person over or under trusts the system. Prior work in this area has focused on understanding the factors that influence a person's trust of a robot (Hancock, et al., 2011). In contrast, by using game-theoretic representations to frame the problem, we are able to develop a set of conditions for determining if an interactive situation demands trust. In two separate experiments, human subjects were asked to evaluate either written narratives or mazes in terms of whether or not they require trust. The results indicate a ϕ1= +0.592 and ϕ2 = +0.406 correlation respectively between the subjects' evaluations and the condition's predictions. This is a strong correlation for a study involving human subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As humans are being progressively pushed further downstream in the decision-making process of autonomous systems, the need arises to ensure that moral standards, however defined, are adhered to by these robotic artifacts. While meaningful inroads have been made in this area regarding the use of ethical lethal military robots, including work by our laboratory, these needs transcend the warfighting domain and are pervasive, extending to eldercare, robot nannies, and other forms of service and entertainment robotic platforms. This paper presents an overview of the spectrum and specter of ethical issues raised by the advent of these systems, and various technical results obtained to date by our research group, geared towards managing ethical behavior in autonomous robots in relation to humanity. This includes: 1) the use of an ethical governor capable of restricting robotic behavior to predefined social norms; 2) an ethical adaptor which draws upon the moral emotions to allow a system to constructively and proactively modify its behavior based on the consequences of its actions; 3) the development of models of robotic trust in humans and its dual, deception, drawing on psychological models of interdependence theory; and 4) concluding with an approach towards the maintenance of dignity in human–robot relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents an algorithm for analyzing social situations within a robot. We contribute a method that allows the robot to use information about the situation to select interactive behaviors. This work is based on interdependence theory, a social psychological theory of interaction and interpersonal situation analysis. Experiments demonstrate the utility of the information provided by the situation analysis algorithm and of the value of this method for guiding robot interaction. We conclude that the situation analysis algorithm offers a viable, principled, and general approach to explore interactive robotics problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conceptualizes the problem of emergency evacuation as a paradigm for investigating human-robot interaction. We argue that emergency evacuation offers unique and important perspectives on human-robot interaction while also demanding close attention to the ethical ramifications of the technologies developed. We present a series of approaches for developing emergency evacuation robots and detail several essential design considerations. This paper concludes with a discussion of the ethical implications of emergency evacuation robots and a roadmap for their development, implementation, and evaluation., Competing Interests: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Wagner.)