Next week is UK robotics week (24th – 30th June). Personally, I have interest about how developments in robotic technology will affect the world that we live in. On the Monday 19th June I participated in events at the University of Liverpool. The ‘Robots who care’ seminar was jointly organised by The Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences of Health, Medicine, and Technology (https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/humanities-social-sciences-health-medicine-technology/) and the Centre for Autonomous Systems Technology (CAST – https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/autonomous-systems/) and consisted of a variety of speakers, presenting different technological, ethical and practical issues concerning the use of robots in a ‘caring’ capacity. This included deep and meaningful questions, such as whether a robot (or ayny artifical intelligent system) can ‘care’ and, fundamentally, what we mean by ‘care’.
I presented a piece of work (on behalf of my co-authors), a collaborative with Computer science. This was an exploratory piece of work to program a robot to exhibit emotional responses in response to posed questions. The idea was to determine whether such applications could potentially be useful in palliative care education, through use of clinical stimulation scenarios.
An abstract describing the work can be found here:
A poster describing the work is available here:
The evening was concluded with a public lecture from Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn, University of Hertfordshire (http://homepages.herts.ac.uk/~comqkd/). Her talk was entitled ‘A fatal attraction’ and explored the fascination that humans have with robots. Further information can be found here.
Amara Nwosu 