Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, Tobias Holstein, Patrizio Pelliccione, Jathoosh Thavarasa

Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Society and Information Technologies: ICSIT 2023, pp. 92-98 (2023); https://doi.org/10.54808/ICSIT2023.01.92

Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic
Division of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden / Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

Tobias Holstein
Division of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden

Patrizio Pelliccione
Department of Information Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics, University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy

Jathoosh Thavarasa
Software Engineering, Efrei Paris, Villejuif, France / Division of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden

Cite this paper as:
Dodig-Crnkovic, G., Holstein, T., Pelliccione, P., Thavarasa, J. (2023). Future Intelligent Autonomous Robots, Ethical by Design – Lessons Learned from Autonomous Cars Ethics. In N. Callaos, L. Robertson, B. Sánchez, T. Tran (Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Society and Information Technologies: ICSIT 2023, pp. 92-98. International Institute of Informatics and Cybernetics. https://doi.org/10.54808/ICSIT2023.01.92

The "ethical by design" approach involves examining all stages of a lifecycle of technology to ensure that they are ethically justifiable and socially sustainable. Building on our work on the ethics of autonomous intelligent robocars, and studies of the literature on the ethics of robotics, we propose for robot applications a set of values and ethical principles including safety, security, privacy, transparency, and explainability, accountability, fairness, human control, well-being, autonomy and freedom, and sustainability. This may help stakeholders in the field of intelligent autonomous robotics to connect ethical principles with their applications. Most ethical considerations we identified in our work on autonomous cars are relevant to all AI-powered robots, but robots require additional examination depending on their application domain, such as social robots (care robots, personal companions, robots used in education, health care, elderly care, education, entertainment, chat-bots), industrial robots, etcetera. Thus, existing ethical frameworks need to be applied in a context-sensitive way, by assessments in interdisciplinary, multi-competent teams through multi-criteria analysis. Furthermore, we argue for the need for continuous development of ethical principles, guidelines, and regulations, informed by the progress of technologies and involving relevant stakeholders. This implies designing the socio-technical system as an intelligent learning ecology.