New IET online course on Robot Ethics goes live

Big day today. My online course on Robot Ethics has been launched on the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Academy web pages. The aim of the course is to give a comprehensive introduction to robot ethics and responsible robotics, and machine ethics. As well as ethical principles the course introduces powerful practical tools including Ethically Aligned Design (also called values driven design), emerging new ethical standards including BS8611 and the powerful method Ethical Risk Assessment,  IEEE 7001 on Transparency, and equally essential Ethical Governance, while showing how ethics, standards and regulation are linked. The course took the best part of 18 months to write, not least because of the strict formatting and style required for IET online courses. For academics, writing courses normally means just creating slides, but - to my surprise - IET online courses are narrated by professional voice actors, so I had to write the narration for each slide. Plus, alot of tests to help students to self-test their understanding.

The course is organized as 10 one hour units, each with several modules, and tests at the end of each module and at the end of the unit. Here is the outline syllabus.

Unit 1: What is Robot Ethics?

This unit defines what we mean by an intelligent robot, robot ethics and ethical robots.

Module 1: Defines what we mean by a robot and robot autonomy, while explaining the difference between first wave (i.e. industrial) robots and second wave (i.e. social) robots
Module 2: Defines intelligence and clarifies the distinction between robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Module 3: Robot/AI ethics: ethics for humans and responsible robotics
Module 4: Machine ethics: ethics for robots

Unit 2: Inspired by Asimov – The EPSRC Principles of Robotics

This unit focuses on the influential EPSRC Principles of Robots.

Module 1: Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, their limitations, and their contribution to robot ethics
Module 2: Why robot ethics are so important today
Module 3: The EPSRC Principles of Robotics
Module 4: Responsible Robotics

Unit 3: An Overview of Ethical Frameworks for AI

This unit looks at some of the more recent ethical frameworks proposed for robotics and AI.

Module 1: A Proliferation of Principles. A helicopter view of all of the ethical frameworks for robotics and artificial intelligence published since Asimov’s laws of robotics. Including what an ethical framework is and what it does and does not offer.
Module 2: The Future of Life Institute Asilomar principles for beneficial AI
Module 3: The UNI Global Union Top 10 Principles for Ethical AI
Module 4: The European Commission’s High Level Expert Group on AI Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI Module 5: The OECD Principles of AIModule 6: Summary: comparing ethical frameworks and their limitations 

Unit 4: Ethical Standards in Robotics

This unit explores emerging ethical standards.

Understand the importance of standards in the modern world and how all standards embody a principle.Understand British Standard BS8611.Understand ethical risk assessment and how it can be applied.Understand how standards are put into practice. 

Unit 5: Ethically Aligned Design in Robotics and AI

This unit introduces the IEEE global ethics initiative and ethically aligned design.

Understand the IEEE ethics initiative and its key aims.Understand the IEEE General Principles for ethical autonomous and intelligent systems.Understand ethically aligned design and – more broadly – values-based engineering.Understand the IEEE 70XX series of ‘human standards’. 

Unit 6: Transparency and Explainability in Robotics and AI

explore transparency, and the closely related topic of accident investigation.

Understand transparency in the context of robots and AI, and why transparency is so important.Understand that transparency means different things to different stakeholders.Understand how transparency in robotics and AI systems can be achieved and demonstrated.Understand the importance of robot accident investigation.

Unit 7: Ethical Governance for Robotics

This unit focusses on ethical governance for robotics.

Understand how it is that we trust our technology.Appreciate how all of the elements of robot ethics fit together in a roadmap, and how these contribute to trust.Have gained an overview of standards and regulation for drones, autonomous vehicles and assistive robotics.Understand good practice in ethical governance.

Unit 8: Machine Ethics 1 – An Asimovian Ethical Robot

In this unit, we will explore machine ethics, and ask the question: is it possible to build a moral machine?

Have considered whether it is possible to build a moral machine.Understand how we can build a simple ethical robot and the consequence engine which makes this possible.Understand experimental trials and what they reveal about the performance and limitations of a simple ethical robot.

Unit 9: Machine Ethics 2 – Approaches, Risks and Governance

Understand the categories of ethical agency and how to test if a machine is ethical.Appreciate that there are several different approaches to building ethical machines.Understand that ethical machines bring new risks and, should they enter real-world applications, require very careful governance.

Unit 10: Final Assessment