Rosie, the robotic helper from The Jetsons, has long symbolized a future where robots can help us in various daily activities at home and work. With the rapid advancement of human-robot interaction (HRI) and AI, such a future with interactive service and home robots seems to be within our grasp. Findings from HRI and robot ethics today, however, paint a different picture than that of our rosy ideals. This talk will unpack some of these findings and illustrate how navigating thorny issues around human relationships with robots (ownership relationship, in particular) is crucial to addressing sustainable development and adoption of robotic solutions in our society.

Bio:  

Dr. AJung Moon is an experimental roboticist. She investigates how robots and AI systems influence the way people move, behave, and make decisions to inform how we can design and deploy such autonomous intelligent systems more responsibly. At McGill University, she is the Director of the McGill Responsible Autonomy & Intelligent System Ethics (RAISE) lab. The RAISE lab is an interdisciplinary group that investigates the social and ethical implications of robots and AI systems and explores what it means for engineers to be designing and deploying such systems responsibly for a better, technological future.