An Experimental Ethics Approach to Robot Ethics Education

We propose an experimental ethics-based curricular module for an undergraduate course on Robot Ethics. The proposed module aims to teach students how human subjects research methods can be used to investigate potential ethical concerns arising in human-robot interaction, by engaging those students in real experimental ethics research. In this paper we describe the proposed curricular module, describe our implementation of that module within a Robot Ethics course offered at a medium-sized engineering university, and statistically evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed curricular module in achieving desired learning objectives. While our results do not provide clear evidence of a quantifiable benefit to undergraduate achievement of the described learning objectives, we note that the module did provide additional learning opportunities for graduate students in the course, as they helped to supervise, analyze, and write up the results of this undergraduate-performed research experiment. Computer Science educators are increasingly acknowledging that it is insufficient for the Computer Science curriculum to entirely focus on technical issues relating to computing and programming. Rather, for Computer Science students to be effective practitioners after graduation, their education must include key concepts from the arts, social sciences, and humanities, so that students not only have the technical knowledge necessary to implement and analyze computational systems, but also have the knowledge from those other fields necessary to decide, on ethical grounds, whether they should implement those systems, and if so, how they should go about designing and evaluating the effectiveness of those systems. This is especially true in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Human-Robot Interaction, in which myriad ethical concerns have captured the public's attention, and in which human interactivity necessitates design and evaluation techniques not otherwise taught in the Computer Science curriculum. Appropriate teaching of these skills is made especially challenging due to the interdisciplinary nature of the subject matter. AI Ethics education must clearly cover key concepts from ethics and moral philosophy as well as the use of