Towards Ethics in Robotic Cities

Abstract

A new concept has emerged from the Internet of Things (IoT) called the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT). Within urban environments, decisions concerning our habitat are commonly made via democratically or by consensus. Future systems involving IoT and IoRT will include, not only hard elements, but also software, (such as bots) and social to soft system interactions, with many stakeholders resulting in ambiguity and unclear requirements. In the case of wicked problems, this research looks into the area of knowledge co-creation and Problem Structuring Methods (PSM), which work better. In the near future, we will be surrounded by a large number of software and hardware systems that uses collaborative AI, or at least co-dependent AI. Similar to the science of human to computer interaction, we will have distributed social systems to distributed AI interaction. This research sheds light on ethics as a socio-technical element when modelling robotic cities infrastructures. The paper considers full actuation autonomy and control by IoT/IoRT, therefore adding software bots and social soft systems into the mix, as well as interdependencies of infrastructure hard-systems. Past robotics research of ethics debates whether ethics should be taught to robots vs hard programmed into robots, whilst a third school of thought discusses the philosophical implications. This research takes an alternative route to that. It provides definitions, establishes common grounds and opens discussions regarding how we can model our societies' interactions with a distributed Artificial Intelligent (AI) system; replacing the various human experts running the autonomous city. The research concludes with a preliminary proposal that is an abstraction resulted from a literature review conducted in this topic area.