Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira – författare

This book highlights some of the most pressing safety, ethical, legal and societal issues related to the diverse contexts in which robotic technologies apply.  Focusing on the essential concept of well-being,  it addresses topics that are fundamental not only for research, but also for industry and end-users, discussing the challenges in a wide variety of applications, including domestic robots, autonomous manufacturing, personal care robots and drones.

This book focuses on the potential benefits that the so-called smart technologies have been bringing to the urban reality and to the management and governance of the city, simultaneously highlighting the necessity for its responsible and ethically guided deployment, respecting essential humanistic values.

The urban ecosystem has been, in the last decades, the locus to where the most advanced forms of technological innovation converge, creating intelligent management platforms meant to produce models of energy, water consumption, mobility/transportation, waste management and efficient cities.

Due to the coincidence of the punctual overlap of its own genesis with the pandemics outbreak, the present book came to embody both the initial dream and desire of an intelligent city place of innovation, development and equity – a dream present in most of the chapters – and the fear not just of the pandemics per se, but of the consequences that this may have for the character ofthe intelligent city and for the nature of its relationship with its dwellers that, like a mother, it is supposed to nurture, shelter and protect.

This book aims to discuss the technical and ethical challenges posed by the present technological framework and to highlight the fundamental role played by human-centred design and human factors in the definition of robotic architectures for human–robot collaboration.

This present book provides valuable insights on the technical, societal and legal challenges posed by the use of artificial intelligent systems in a plethora of different applications, from embodied robotic systems to ML algorithms.

Engaging with concerns about equity, privacy, surveillance and respect for human dignity, “Towards Trustworthy Artificial Intelligent Systems” highlights the fundamental factors on which stakeholders’ trust relies, identifying benchmarking, standardisation and certification as milestones grounding and consolidating that future trust.

The multidisciplinary approach followed will make this book a valuable resource for all those involved in the production and deployment of AIs, as well as for academia and legal practitioners. 

The fast development of intelligent technologies in the previous years, their boost during the COVID crisis, and their huge acceleration with the proliferation of the Large Language Models has led industry, governance, legislators and regulators to race to achieve production control, striving to define regional and global regulatory frameworks,  capable of guaranteeing their safe deployment.

In an evolving and uneven regulatory context, balancing fast technological development and the safe and ethical use of these new disruptive technologies, with an expected total economic impact of 4.4 trillion dollars annually, becomes presently the biggest challenge.

This book contains the Proceedings of the International Conference on Robot Ethics, held in Lisbon on October 23 and 24, 2015. The conference provided a multidisciplinary forum for discussing central and evolving issues concerning safety and ethics that have arisen in various contexts where robotic technologies are being applied. The papers are intended to promote the formulation of more precise safety standards and ethical frameworks for the rapidly changing field of robotic applications. The conference was held at Pavilhão do Conhecimento/Ciência Viva in Lisbon and brought together leading researchers and industry representatives, promoting a dialogue that combines different perspectives and experiences to arrive at viable solutions for ethical problems in the context of robotics. 

The conference topics included but were not limited to emerging ethical, safety, legal and societal problems in the following domains:

• Service/Social Robots: Robots performing tasks in human environments and involving close human-robot interactions in everyday households; robots for education and entertainment; and robots employed in elderly and other care applications

• Mobile Robots: Self-driving vehicles, autonomous aircraft, trains, cars and drones

• Robots used in medicine and for therapeutic purposes

• Robots used in surveillance and military functions