This book will help researchers and engineers in the design of ethical systems for robots, addressing the philosophical questions that arise and exploring modern applications such as assistive robots and self-driving cars.The contributing authors are among the leading academic and industrial researchers on this topic and the book will be of value to researchers, graduate students and practitioners engaged with robot design, artificial intelligence and ethics.

When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross t...

Computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, and driving trains. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach argue that as robots take on more and more responsibility, they must be programmed with moral decision-making abilities, for our own safety. Taking a fast paced tour through the latest thinking about philosoph...

What it means when media moves from the new to the habitual—when our bodies become archives of supposedly obsolescent media, streaming, updating, sharing, saving.New media—we are told—exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same. Meanwhile, analytic, creative, and commercial efforts focus exclusively on the next big thing: figuring out what will spread and who will spread it the fastest. But what do we mis...

Confronting the digital revolution in academia, this book examines the application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in the Arts & Humanities. Uniting differing perspectives, leading and emerging scholars discuss the theoretical and practical challenges that computation raises for these disciplines.

The ego-net approach to social network analysis, which takes discrete individual actors and their contacts as its starting point, is one of the most widely used approaches in the field. This is the first textbook to take readers through each stage of ego-net research, from conception, through research design and data gathering to analysis.It starts with the basics, assuming no prior knowledge of social network analysis, but then moves on to introduce cutting edge innovations, cover...

Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments provides students, faculty, and instructional designers with a clear, concise introduction to the major pedagogical and psychological theories and their implications for the design of new learning environments for schools, universities, or corporations. Leading experts describe the most important contemporary theories that form the foundation of the conception and design of student-centered learning environments and new applications...

From Robocop to the Terminator to Eve 8, no image better captures our deepest fears about technology than the cyborg, the person who is both flesh and metal, brain and electronics. But philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark sees it differently. Cyborgs, he writes, are not something to be feared--we already are cyborgs. In Natural-Born Cyborgs, Clark argues that what makes humans so different from other species is our capacity to fully incorporate tools and supporting cultu...

As the title indicates, this book highlights the shifting and emergent features that represent life online, specifically in and around the territory of e-learning.Cybercultures in themselves are complex conglomerations of ideas, philosophies, concepts, and theories, some of which are fiercely contradictory. As a construct, 'cyberculture' is a result of sustained attempts by diverse groups of people to make sense of multifarious activities, linguistic codes, and practices in complic...

Why computer games can be ethical, how players use their ethical values in gameplay, and the implications for game design.Despite the emergence of computer games as a dominant cultural industry (and the accompanying emergence of computer games as the subject of scholarly research), we know little or nothing about the ethics of computer games. Considerations of the morality of computer games seldom go beyond intermittent portrayals of them in the mass media as train...

An investigation of the aesthetics and politics of new visual media under twenty-first-century capitalism, from console games to virtual reality to video installation art.In Biopolitical Screens, Pasi Väliaho charts and conceptualizes the imagery that composes our affective and conceptual reality under twenty-first-century capitalism. Väliaho investigates the role screen media play in the networks that today harness human minds and bodies—the ways that ima...

Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory offers a comprehensive, systematic presentation of the interdisciplinary decision-making process by drawing on student and professional work from the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and applied fields.Designed for active learning and problem-based approaches, the Fourth Edition includes expanded discussion of epistemology, creativity within the interdisciplinary research process, confirm...