Service robots,care ethics,and design

It should not be a surprise in the near future to encounter either a personal or a professional service robot in our homes and/or our work places: according to the International Federation for Robots, there will be approx 35 million service robots at work by 2018. Given that individuals will interact and even cooperate with these service robots, their design and development demand ethical attention. With this in mind I suggest the use of an approach for incorporating ethics into the design process of robots known as Care Centered Value Sensitive Design (CCVSD). Although this approach was originally and intentionally designed for the healthcare domain, the aim of this paper is to present a preliminary study of how personal and professional service robots might also be evaluated using the CCVSD approach. The normative foundations for CCVSD come from its reliance on the care ethics tradition and in particular the use of care practices for: (1) structuring the analysis and, (2) determining the values of ethical import. To apply CCVSD outside of healthcare one must show that the robot has been integrated into a care practice. Accordingly, the practice into which the robot is to be used must be assessed and shown to meet the conditions of a care practice. By investigating the foundations of the approach I hope to show why it may be applicable for service robots and further to give examples of current robot prototypes that can and cannot be evaluated using CCVSD.     

Moral appearances: emotions,robots, and human morality

Can we build ‘moral robots’? If morality depends on emotions, the answer seems negative. Current robots do not meet standard necessary conditions for having emotions: they lack consciousness, mental states, and feelings. Moreover, it is not even clear how we might ever establish whether robots satisfy these conditions. Thus, at most, robots could be programmed to follow rules, but it would seem that such ‘psychopathic’ robots would be dangerous since they would lack full moral agency. However, I will argue that in the future we might nevertheless be able to build quasi-moral robots that can learn to create the appearance of emotions and the appearance of being fully moral. I will also argue that this way of drawing robots into our social-moral world is less problematic than it might first seem, since human morality also relies on such appearances.     

松下研发出升级版洗发机器人

松下公司26日宣布,研发出了橡胶手指洗发机器人的升级版。除了洗发外,这款机器人还具备护发和吹干功能,可以满足行动不便需要看护者的需求。松下计划对机器人进一步改良争取于2012年度内使其投入实用。     

Negotiating autonomy and responsibility in military robots

Central to the ethical concerns raised by the prospect of increasingly autonomous military robots are issues of responsibility. In this paper we examine different conceptions of autonomy within the discourse on these robots to bring into focus what is at stake when it comes to the autonomous nature of military robots. We argue that due to the metaphorical use of the concept of autonomy, the autonomy of robots is often treated as a black box in discussions about autonomous military robots. When the black box is opened up and we see how autonomy is understood and ‘made’ by those involved in the design and development of robots, the responsibility questions change significantly.     

Deepwater tests of robots successful

With the support of the China Ocean Mineral Resources R&D Association (COMRA) and the National High Technology Development Program (dubbed "863 Program"), researchers from the CAS Institute of Automation have recently completed deep ocean tests of CR-02, an autonomous underwater vehicle(AUV) with the maximum operating depth of 6,000m they have designed and built.     

企业社会责任、地区社会信任与融资约束

以中国2010～2016年上市公司为研究对象,探讨社会信任对社会责任与融资约束之间的调节作用,并通过社会责任的延续性划分验证社会信任在不同公司策略情况下的影响机制。研究发现:公司承担的社会责任越多,受到的融资约束越小;地区的社会信任会加强企业承担社会责任和融资约束之间的关系;社会信任对社会责任和融资约束的调节效应只存在于非延续性社会责任策略的企业。     

Stochastic control and time scheduling for irregular robots

Vehicles of different sizes are difficult to navigate in close vicinity. In this paper, we propose multi-vehicle coordination strategy by stochastic control and time scheduling to guarantee no collisions. We use contours and relative motions of vehicles to calculate collision time and use it in multi-vehicle scheduling and reduce computation burden. The proposed strategy enables the vehicles to add calculation delay when vehicles are moving towards the destinations. To avoid complicated control rule design for motion-restricted irregular vehicles, we propose stochastic control to provide satisfactory performance. By changing the frequency of control update, a modification is proposed to take congestion into account. Simulation examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Implications and consequences of robots with biological brains

In this paper a look is taken at the relatively new area of culturing neural tissue and embodying it in a mobile robot platform—essentially giving a robot a biological brain. Present technology and practice is discussed. New trends and the potential effects of and in this area are also indicated. This has a potential major impact with regard to society and ethical issues and hence some initial observations are made. Some initial issues are also considered with regard to the potential consciousness of such a brain.     

社会资本、社会认知和团队知识转移

研发团队是组织进行知识创造的理想场所,团队内部的知识转移能力很大程度上决定知识创造结果.社会认知和社会资本理论经常被用来解释研发团队内部知识转移绩效.分析了这两种理论工具之间的关联,通过对这两种理论的整合,提出了影响研发团队内部知识转移绩效的一种新的理论框架.     

Modifiable futures: science fiction at the bench

Science fiction remains an alien dimension of the history of science. Historical and literary studies of science have become increasingly attentive to various "literary technologies" in scientific practice, the metaphorical features of scientific discourse, and the impact of popular science writing on the social development of scientific knowledge. But the function of science fiction and even literature as such in the history of scientific and technological innovation has often been obscured, misconstrued, or repudiated owing to conventional notions of authorship, influence, and the organic unity of texts. The better to address those close encounters where scientific practice makes use of speculative fiction, this essay proposes that we instead analyze such exchanges as processes of appropriation, remixing, and modification.     

后现代主义、经验论与社会建构主义

在哲学领域,特别是科学哲学领域,社会建构主义思潮的影响越来越大,“建构”成为极为时髦的哲学话语:知识的建构、技术的建构、权力的建构……,如何理解建构主义呢?文章从与之密切关联的经验主义、后现代主义角度给以分析,揭示建构主义的内涵。     

政府补贴、企业创新和社会福利

考虑政府的最优补贴策略及其对企业、消费者和社会的影响问题。纳入政府、创新企业和异质性消费者三个主体,构建政府分别补贴给企业和消费者以及无政补贴时的博弈模型并分析均衡结果。研究表明:当创新产品生产成本处于较低或者中等水平时政府才应当实施补贴,否则不要补贴,并且创新产品生产成本越低,最优补贴额度越高。政府补贴给企业或者消费者时,等效地扩大了创新产品的需求,改善了企业收益、消费者剩余和社会福利。并且,当企业面对异质性消费者时,政府补贴对企业的新产品创新起到积极影响。     

Energy-Time optimal control of wheeled mobile robots

This paper focuses on the energy-time optimal control of wheeled mobile robots undergoing point-to-point transitions in an obstacles free space. Two interchangeable models are used to arrive at the necessary conditions for optimality. The first formulation exploits the Hamiltonian, while the second formulation considers the first variation of the augmented cost to derive the necessary conditions for optimality. Jacobi elliptic functions are shown to parameterize the closed form solutions for the states, control and costates. Analysis of the optimal control reveal that they are constrained to lie on a cylinder whose circular cross-section is a function of the weight penalizing the relative costs of time and energy. The evolving optimal costates for the second formulation are shown to lie on the intersection of two cylinders. The optimal control for the wheeled mobile robot undergoing point-to-point motion is also developed where the linear velocity is constrained to be time-invariant. It is shown that the costates are constrained to lie on the intersection of a cylinder and an extruded parabola. Numerical results for various point-to-point maneuvers are presented to illustrate the change in the structure of the optimal trajectories as a function of the relative location of the terminal and initial states.     

集群、社会资本与企业成长

围绕集群与企业成长这个主题,首先回顾了不同研究视角,明确指出采用社会资本视角有可能更好地整合集群与企业成长的不同视角。在对集群社会资本概念及其与集群内企业成长作用关系相关理论进行梳理的基础上,还进一步剖析了现有研究的不出,指出了未来研究方向。     

On the moral responsibility of military robots

This article discusses mechanisms and principles for assignment of moral responsibility to intelligent robots, with special focus on military robots. We introduce the concept autonomous power as a new concept, and use it to identify the type of robots that call for moral considerations. It is furthermore argued that autonomous power, and in particular the ability to learn, is decisive for assignment of moral responsibility to robots. As technological development will lead to robots with increasing autonomous power, we should be prepared for a future when people blame robots for their actions. It is important to, already today, investigate the mechanisms that control human behavior in this respect. The results may be used when designing future military robots, to control unwanted tendencies to assign responsibility to the robots. Independent of the responsibility issue, the moral quality of robots’ behavior should be seen as one of many performance measures by which we evaluate robots. How to design ethics based control systems should be carefully investigated already now. From a consequentialist view, it would indeed be highly immoral to develop robots capable of performing acts involving life and death, without including some kind of moral framework.     

社会心理学:探索人与社会的互动推动社会的和谐与可持续发展

社会心理学是研究人与社会情景交互影响的科学。在100多年的发展进程中．社会心理学一方面致力于解决重大社会现实问题,另一方面在此基础上建立起了完备的学科体系与不可替代的学科地位,这种与社会的持续对话是社会心理学生命力的源泉,也奠定了该学科基础研究和应用研究并重的特色。从研究主题来说,当代社会心理学的研究主要涉及到三大领域：社会认知、社会关系以及群体与群体过程。进化社会心理学及文化心理学等新领域的兴起进一步拓展了社会心理学的研究范围。当前中国的社会发展现实为社会心理学研究提供了广阔的舞台。研究者可以在社会公正与腐败、民众心态与主观幸福感、社会互动与人际和谐、群际关系与民族冲突、非常规突发事件与应急管理、工作压力与员工职业心理健康、社会矛盾与网络群体事件、民众价值观变迁与道德教育等方面大有所为。鉴于社会心理学所具有的重要科学价值及其对推动社会可持续发展的重要贡献,我国在统筹和解决国家重大现实问题时应纳入社会心理学的视角,在规划和部署国家重大科学研究计划时重视社会心理学研究,在加大力度推动心理学科全盘发展时促进社会心理学人才队伍建设．全方位多角度地推动我国社会心理学的发展,并为满足国家重大社会现实需求提供坚实的科学基础。