Responsible AI: Intelligent Toys

Recording

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Intelligent Toys

Episode 02: Children interact with toys designed with artificial intelligence-based technologies and are doing so in increasingly nuanced ways. Intelligent toys and other smart robots for children can deliver educational content, inspire emotional bonds, and even help children with autism build social skills. However, these devices also raise ethical, legal, and human rights concerns.

Join us for an interview with leading experts on intelligent toys and other smart tools for children. They explore the current capabilities of these devices and their potential medium and long-term capabilities. Learn about the ethical, legal and social implications of these technologies and consider how these concerns should inform developers, users and regulators. This interview will be followed by a Q&A session with audience members.

This is the second in a three-part AAAS series that is sponsored by Hitachi and aims at exploring artificial intelligence technologies, the current capabilities of the technologies, their ethical, legal and social implications, and the responsibilities of the scientists and engineers developing the technologies.

Recordings from this series are archived on YouTube and made available on the AAAS website.

Participants

Kerstin Dautenhahn is Professor and Canada 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and director of the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory. Her research focuses on human-robot interaction, social robotics, and assistive technology. Before going to the University of Waterloo, she led the development of the KASPAR robot, designed as a social companion for children with autism. She is an IEEE Fellow and the author of more than 300 peer-reviewed articles.

Alexa Koenig is Executive Director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. She teaches classes on human rights and international criminal law with a particular focus on the impact of emerging technologies on human rights practice. In 2018-19, she supervised a team of students at the Human Rights Center who produced a memorandum on artificial intelligence and human rights for UNICEF.

Jessica Wyndham (Moderator) is the Director of the Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program. She also serves as coordinator of the AAAS Science and Human Rights Coalition, a network of scientific, engineering, and health associations that recognize the role of science and technology in human rights. Her areas of expertise include the intersections of science, technology, human rights and ethics, the social responsibilities of scientists and engineers, and the role of professional scientific, engineering and health societies in the promotion and protection of human rights.

Additional Resources

Executive Summary: Artificial Intelligence and Children's Rights (UNICEF Innovation and Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley, 2019)

Articles from the Science Family of Journals

Improving social skills in children with ASD using a long-term, in-home social robot (Scassellati et al., 2018)

Personalized machine learning for robot perception of affect and engagement in autism therapy (Rudovic et al., 2018)

How artificial intelligence lets Barbie talk to children (DeMarco, 2015)

Minds of their own (Service, 2014)