Bioethics Talk: Bertram Malle (Brown)

TECHNOLOGY AND ETHICS

 

Speaker: Bertram Malle, Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Co-director of the Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative, Brown University

Topic:  What is “value alignment” between machine and human?  Theory, data, and policy implications for social robots 

 

Date: Wednesday – November 30th, 2016

Time: 4:30-6:30 workshop 

      (Light refreshments will be served)

Location: Rosenkranz, 115 Prospect Street (just beyond ISPS)

Room: 02

 

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ABSTRACT:  As technical advances allow robots to make increasingly autonomous decisions they must be designed to learn, represent, and follow the social and moral standards of the communities they serve.  Such standards are often called values.  Indeed, some scholars have argued that we must create “value alignment” between intelligent machines and humans.  However, the concept of “value” is ill-defined, and we do not even know how values guide human behavior.  Instead, I propose to pursue a more realistic and computationally tractable goal—to embed norms in robots, because norms can be conceptualized as instructions to act in defined ways in defined contexts.  To pursue this project we need to develop a theory of norms in humans; identify relevant human norms (e.g., for elderly care, education); examine whether the same norms should apply to robots; and create and evaluate the resulting norm-competent robots.  I report on initial results of this project and sketch future directions, including how policy may be influenced by it.

 

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BIOGRAPHY: Bertram F. Malle is Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University and Co-Director of the Humanity-Centered Robotics Initiative at Brown. He was trained in psychology, philosophy, and linguistics at the University of Graz, Austria, and received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1995. He received the Society of Experimental Social Psychology Outstanding Dissertation award in 1995, a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 1997, and he is past president of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology.  Malle’s research, funded by the NSF, Army, Templeton Foundation, Office of Naval Research, and DARPA, focuses on social cognition (intentionality, mental state inferences, behavior explanations), moral psychology (cognitive and social blame, guilt, norms), and human-robot interaction (moral competence in robots, socially assistive robotics). He has distributed his work in over 100 articles and several books.  See http://bit.ly/scs_bfm for more information.

 

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Open to everyone (undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, administration, and community members) whether or not you have participated in previous sessions of the Technology and Ethics Working Research Group.

 

 

The Technology and Ethics Working Research Group is a project of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics – Tech & Ethics Chair: Wendell Wallach –wendell.wallach@yale.edu