The Ethical Roboticist

I am often asked the question: what does a professor of robot ethics do? In this talk I will outline my work in both robot and AI ethics, and in ethical robots. Robot ethics is concerned with the human problem of the ethical design and application of robots and robotic systems, whereas ethical robots describes the technical problem of how to design robots that are capable of choosing actions on the basis of ethical considerations. That we need the former is incontrovertible, while the latter may not be such a good idea.