S Y S T E M D E S I G N F O R E M P A T H Y I N D E C I S I O N M A K I N G
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2020-06-18
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nl
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Abstract
Automation is everywhere: from healthcare to self-driving cars, but also in military use. The rise of
Automated Weapon Systems have led to a global societal discussion on automation in military
context. A potential solution is the notion of meaningful human control. There are several theories,
but the primary theory is that meaningful human control aims to ensure there is always a human
that can bear moral responsibility and can be held legally accountable. However, so far, the role of
emotions in meaningful human control has not been sufficiently considered for responsibility taking
and responsibility attribution in controllers of automated systems. This thesis discusses the
importance of emotions in meaningful human control and presents a possible solution of an
affective intelligent virtual agent in one experiment and tests if this leads to prosocial behaviour in a
second experiment. Particularly, this thesis provides an affective system design and specifically
studies the effect of emotional display by a virtual agent on feelings of empathy and prosocial
behaviour. Although the results of the experiments do not show an effect of the proposed affective
intervention on empathy levels or prosocial behaviour, there is still much to explore and learn
about how we could modulate affective empathy and enhance responsibility. The importance of
empathy in automated systems can no longer be ignored in the debate and should be taken into
account when designing for meaningful human control.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen