Alan Winfield's Web Log

     Now it’s personal. I’ve just had a phone call from my mom.  Fine, you might think, but it’s sure as hell not fine. She’s been dead 5 y...

For this story, written as the second exercise in my Writing Short Stories course back in June , I attempted a story without dialogue. I lov...

Back in June I signed up for an online course on Writing Short Stories (the next steps) , run by the Bishopsgate Institute . The course was ...

A few weeks ago I gave a short paper* at the excellent International Conference on Robot Ethics and Standards (ICRES 2020) , outlining a cas...

This week I have been attending (virtually) the excellent RoboPhilosophy conference, and this morning gave a plenary talk "Why did you...

One of the many things I promised myself when I retired nearly two years ago was to get back to some coding. Why? Two reasons: one is that w...

Yesterday I gave an talk at the ICRA 2020 workshop Against Robot Dystopias . The workshop should have been in Paris but - like most academi...

It's been over a year since my  last progress report  from the Autonomous Robot Evolution (ARE) project , so an update on the ARE Robot ...

Robots. What could possibly go wrong? Imagine that your elderly mother, or grandmother, has an assisted living robot to help her live inde...

For many researchers the Holy Grail of robotics and AI is the creation of artificial persons: artefacts with equivalent general competencies...

Here are the slides for my keynote, presented this morning at the International Conference on Robot Ethics and Standards (ICRES 2019) . The ...

A couple of days ago I gave a short 15 minute talk at an excellent 5x15 event in Bristol . The talk I actually gave was different to the one...

In preparation for a meeting of the WEF global AI council today , we were asked the question: What do you think are the top three pol...

This blogpost is an updated round up of the various sets of ethical principles of robotics and AI that have been proposed to date, ordered b...