Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - REELER (Responsible Ethical Learning with Robotics)

Teaser

Responsible Ethical Learning with Robotics – the REELER project – emerged in response to a call for collaboration between social scientists and humanists (SSH) and the developers of digital technologies, to ensure more responsible technological research and innovation that...

Summary

Responsible Ethical Learning with Robotics – the REELER project – emerged in response to a call for collaboration between social scientists and humanists (SSH) and the developers of digital technologies, to ensure more responsible technological research and innovation that goes hand in hand with societal needs and expectations, with new benefits for European society.
Robots have the potential to radically alter human societies as they are expected to increasingly co-exist with or replace humans. While there is a growing amount of literature predicting the economic and social impacts of robots, few empirical studies have considered how roboticists’ visions of a robotic future may differ from users/affected stakeholders’ needs and concerns, and how these ideas come through in roboticists’ design practices.

REELER is a research-driven, multidisciplinary collaboration between 4 partners:
Anthropologists and social scientists from Aarhus University, Danish School of Education (DPU) (Denmark); Roboticists from Ab.Acus (Italy); Anthropologists and ethicists from De Montfort University (UK) and Economists from University of Hohenheim (Germany).
Through collaborative learning we aim to raise awareness of human proximity in robotics development. Human proximity refers to an alignment with researched human needs and values, which are relevant from both ethical and market standpoints.
To do so, REELER will study roboticists and affected stakeholders through a minimum of 10 ethnographic case studies of robots in Europe with qualitative interviews with roboticists and users/affected stakeholders.
REELER aims to:
● Identify roboticists’ understandings (and assumptions) of users, and their visions of robots.
● Explore gaps (in needs and values) between roboticists, users/affected stakeholders, and policy-makers. ● Investigate the potential individual and societal effects of robot implementation.
● Calculate the potential economic and structural impacts of robotics on the labour market.
● Examine collaboration and interdisciplinarity in robot development.

We bring the results of this work to outreach activities, such as: Mini-publics, Sociodramas and Robot Expert Panels, Conference workshops. REELER will offer proactive steps towards ethical and responsible robots by connecting insights from all of these approaches in the REELER Roadmap.
The REELER roadmap will present
a) ethical guidelines for a human proximity model, with recommendations for aligning designs with human needs and values,
b) methods for including the voices of new types of users and affected stakeholders (e.g., through Mini-publics) and for challenging existing assumptions about users/design (via Sociodrama, for example),
c) a simulation tool for policymaking that will simulate the potential impact of particular design interventions.

Work performed

A core focus in REELER is to ensure common ground and collaborative learning, wherefore project members regularly meet to conduct research together and develop methodological and theoretical dimensions of the research work. The first steps towards common ground was achieved through literature review of relevant concepts and their implication for our research practices, a mapping of selected robotics activities per country in Europe, and a Best Practice Research and Observation Guide. This ensures a uniform approach to the ethnographic research and a commonly agreed set of selection criteria to identify suitable robot cases. The selection criteria aim at ensuring variation across country/nationality, human proximity, robot type, sector and/or application, and organization and funding type.

So far, REELER has conducted 10 multi-sited case studies that involve participant observations and interviews with more than 132 persons (interviewees) in Italy, Poland, France, Spain, Denmark, England and Ireland, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Cypress, and Portugal. Each case study is summarized in a report providing a review of the type of robot and an overview of empirical findings.
After the first fieldwork period, the data processing and analytical efforts have begun. To look for variation across cases is also a methodological take in this work, where we seek to identify diverse or aligned understandings of robotics among the interviewed roboticists and users/affected stakeholders and across the aforementioned case write-ups. From preliminary analysis of the data we have identified 11 themes, used for coding our material.

REELER is also developing and testing two potential tools for collaborative learning across disciplines and users/affected stakeholders-roboticists. These tools are Mini-publics and Sociodrama. They serve both as research methods for us to explore how collaborative learning may best be achieved between people who do not necessarily have shared interests and as means to disseminate about project activities and results to relevant target groups (including roboticists, users/affected stakeholders, the general public and policy-makers) in other ways than the traditional website and publications.

Because REELER is one of the first SSH-oriented RIAs in robotics and a highly multidisciplinary project, we have found it essential to learn from others and disseminate about our research at a range of conferences and seminars/events involving different types of audiences/disciplines. The following lists the conferences and seminars in which we have participated and the role we have played:
● European Robotics Forum, March 2017, UK.
Presentation in the workshops “Ethics - Should society be afraid of robots?” and “Success Stories”.
● STS (In)Sensibilities, 4S – Society for Social Studies of Science, August 2017, USA
“Different modes of engagement: The sensibilities of feeding assistive robotics.” Peer-reviewed paper presentation by Niels Christian Mossfeldt Nickelsen
● RoboPhilosophy February 2018, Austria
Organisers of the workshop “Exploring Ethical Responsibilities Through Democratic Participation and Expert Panel Discussion”.
● Responsible Robotics: Shaping our Future with Robotics, February 2018, the Netherlands
Co-organiser of the event.
● Human Robot Interaction, March 2018, USA.
Organisers of the workshop “An alternative HRI methodology: The use of ethnography to identify and address Ethical, Legal, and Societal (ELS) issues”.
Papers have subsequently been submitted for peer-review and accepted for publication for the Special Issue on Ethnography in HRI Research by DeGruyter (https://www.degruyter.com/page/1672).
● European Robotics Forum, March 2018, Finland
Organisers of the workshop “Robot Development and Design: what about ethical aspects?” and presentation in the workshop “Services to the Community”.

Final results

REELER has progressed beyond the state of the art by expanding the concept of ‘users’ to ‘affected stakeholders’. A robot’s target group is no only its direct users, but also people who might never see or use the robot. This group of affected stakeholders are also relevant to include when contemplating robot solutions as they too will experience the impact of the robot.

Through our ethnographic work, outreach activities and dissemination, REELER has also had an impact by raising awareness of how social science can contribute to understandings of robots. We have taken the first steps towards making robot designers and policy-makers more aware of the variety of societal impacts robots have and can have on affected stakeholders.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.reeler.eu.