The first Google self-driving car accident causing injuries has occurred. Luckily the injuries were only minor. No information is available, it seems, on whether this will lead to a legal case.

Several news items the last few days claimed that a group of three Nao robots showed a certain degree of self-consciousness. This is a gross exaggeration. It is demonstrated that the bots reason correctly in a wise man / muddy children scenario. For that they only need to apply some well known simple logical reasoning…

Perhaps you already suspected this: traffic light buttons are sometimes lying to you. If you push such a button, it might not have any physical effect at all. But it does have a psychological effect, giving rise to a feeling of control and a sense of agency that can be exploited for a variety of…

According to this article in the Guardian, autonomous cars might be set to take over our roads. The article quotes Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, who recently estimated that the switch from human-operated to autonomous cars might take about 20 years. Musk went on to predict that the switch could lead to a ban…

This article sketches a picture that makes you realize that the drone scenes from homeland are maybe not far from the truth. Another worrying aspect is that probably the drone pilots quitting their jobs is reason for the US military to be even more interested in autonomous drones. The article can also be viewed more…

This acticle in The Times is about exactly the things we are interested in in our project. For a first opinion on the issue raised in the first paragraph: I suspect a consequentialist form of ethics is the better choice for self-driving cars.

Terrible 2013 bus accident in Boston raises questions about the responsibility of navigation devices (and / or their manufacturers / designers / sellers, etc). Especially interesting about this case is that both TomTom and Garmin are targeted, since it is unclear which one of two navigation devices was used. In Dutch law, if it is…

Quite a balanced piece at CNN. One thing the doomsday philosophers never managed to explain to me is why there will be this ‘intelligence explosion’. Maybe a human intelligence explosion will outpace any artificial intelligence explosion. But again: we do not need such an explosion to be worried about our tendency to outsource responsibilities to…

Yesterday, on Dutch national television (in Dutch, I am afraid), the Dutch philosopher of culture Jos de Mul discussed the doomsday predictions of people like Stephan Hawking warning for AI taking over some day. Jos de Mul takes a stance I agree with: we do not need the doomsday picture to be worried about how…

The REINS project aims to provide a framework for automating responsibility, liability, and risk checking for intelligent systems. As intelligent systems are increasingly integrated into our daily life, the division, assignment and checking of responsibilities between human and artificial agents become increasingly important. From robots in medicine, the military and transportation (self-driving cars); to automated trading agents…