Civilized collaboration: Ethical architectures for enforcing legal requirements and mediating social norms in HRI

The ways in which we treat each other, typically underpinned by an ethical theory, serve as a foundation for civilized activity. Bounds and requirements are established for normal and acceptable interactions between humans. If we are to create robotic systems to reside among us, they must also adhere to a set of related values that humans operate under. This talk first describes the importance of such conventions in human-robot interaction, then outlines a way forward including the difficult research questions remaining to be confronted in ethical human robot interaction (HRI). In particular, examples involving architectures using ethical governors, moral emotions, responsibility advisors and theories of mind are described in two quite different contexts: warfare [1,2] and the maintenance of human dignity in healthcare [3-5]. Even the role of deception must be considered as an important adjunct to HRI, as it may yield more effective intentional and autonomous social robots if properly deployed [6-7]. Finally, we can consider how robots may eventually be able to engineer more socially just human beings via nudging and the ethical questions associated with using such devices [8].