Books
Robots Healthcare and the Law - Fosch Villaronga.pdfFosch-Villaronga, E. (2019) Robots, Healthcare and the Law: Regulating Automation in Personal Care. Routledge, New York
The integration of robotic systems and artificial intelligence into healthcare settings is accelerating. As these technological developments interact socially with children, the elderly, or the disabled, they may raise concerns besides mere physical safety; concerns that include data protection, inappropriate use of emotions, invasion of privacy, autonomy suppression, decrease in human interaction, and cognitive safety. Given the novelty of these technologies and the uncertainties surrounding the impact of care automation, it is unclear how the law should respond.
This book investigates the legal and regulatory implications of the growing use of personal care robots for healthcare purposes. It explores the interplay between various aspects of the law, including safety, data protection, responsibility, transparency, autonomy, and dignity; and it examines different robotic and AI systems, such as social therapy robots, physical assistant robots for rehabilitation, and wheeled passenger carriers. Highlighting specific problems and challenges in regulating complex cyber-physical systems in concrete healthcare applications, it critically assesses the adequacy of current industry standards and emerging regulatory initiatives for robots and AI. After analyzing the potential legal and ethical issues associated with personal care robots, it concludes that the primarily principle-based approach of recent law and robotics studies is too abstract to be as effective as required by the personal care context. Instead, it recommends bridging the gap between general legal principles and their applicability in concrete robotic and AI technologies with a risk-based approach using impact assessments.
As the first book to compile both legal and regulatory aspects of personal care robots, this book will be a valuable addition to the literature on robotics, artificial intelligence, human–robot interaction, law, and philosophy of technology.
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Fosch-Villaronga, E. & Hadassah Drukarch (2021) AI for Healthcare Robotics. AI for Everything Series, Routledge, forthcoming.
What is artificial intelligence? What are healthcare robotics? How can AI and healthcare robotics assist in contemporary medicine? Robotics and AI offer society unimaginable benefits from enabling wheelchair users to walk again, perform surgery in a highly automated and minimally invasive way, and deliver care more efficiently. AI for Healthcare Robotics explains what healthcare robots are and how AI empowers them in achieving the goals of contemporary medicine.
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AI for Healthcare Robotics.pdf
Regulating AI and Applying AI in Legal Practice
Custers, B., Fosch-Villaronga, E. (eds) Law and Artificial Intelligence. Regulating AI and Applying AI in Legal Practice. Information Technology and Law Series, vol 35. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague.
This book provides an in-depth overview of what is currently happening in the field of Law and Artificial Intelligence (AI). From deep fakes and disinformation to killer robots, surgical robots, and AI lawmaking, the many and varied contributors to this volume discuss how AI could and should be regulated in the areas of public law, including constitutional law, human rights law, criminal law, and tax law, as well as areas of private law, including liability law, competition law, and consumer law.
Aimed at an audience without a background in technology, this book covers how AI changes these areas of law as well as the legal practice itself. This scholarship should prove of value to academics in several disciplines (e.g., law, ethics, sociology, politics, and public administration) and those who may find themselves confronted with AI in the course of their work, particularly people working within the legal domain (e.g., lawyers, judges, law enforcement officers, public prosecutors, lawmakers, and policy advisors).
Bart Custers is Professor of Law and Data Science at eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Eduard Fosch-Villaronga is Assistant Professor at eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Diversity Equity and Inclusion in Embodied AI: Reflecting on and Re-imagining our Future with Embodied AI
Technology often works silently as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it has the power to amplify inequality, reinforce existing stereotypes, and further push people into categories that do not represent them. On the other, its design may help devise strategies and counternarratives that redirect ongoing discourses towards a fairer and more inclusive society. However, giving voice to and operationalizing these reflections is difficult, especially in new complex fields such as robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). To this aim, this book collects the reflections, insights, and tools resulting from the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Embodied AI (DEI4EAI) project. This book is intended for students, researchers, designers, developers, and societal stakeholders working with embodied AI and interested in contributing to more equitable and just futures. All those things dubbed as ordinary are in fact, so cultural: they represent values, beliefs, and narratives that influence how we collect and use data, how we craft algorithms, how we define agency, how we mold AI embodiment, how we design interaction, and how we define embodied AI intervention. Although in different roles and capacities, designers, researchers, and broader stakeholders like policymakers and communities are responsible for reflecting on how their values, perspectives, biases, and stereotypes may affect embodied AI technology. This is important because siloed practices influence our capacity to assess the risks and harms of our actions. To prevent designing harmful and inadequate technology, there is the need to inspect narratives, practices, and methods with reflexivity and openness to shift mindsets.
DEI4EAIBOOKLET_WEB_DOUBLEPAGES.pdf