Lmm Lambèr Royakkers

Strategic niche management of social innovations: the case of social entrepreneurship

Strategic niche management (SNM), a tool to understand and manage radical socio-technical innovations and facilitate their diffusion, has always departed from a technical artefact. Many radical innovations, however, do not revolve around such an artefact. Social entrepreneurship is a new business model that combines a social goal with a business mentality and is heralded as an important new way to create social value such as sustainability. This study examines if and how SNM can be applied to such a social innovation. It identifies theoretical and practical limitations and proposes solutions. The main conclusion is that SNM can be used to analyse radical social innovation, although it requires rethinking the initial entry point for research and management. Exemplifying quotes are proposed as an alternative. Second, this paper suggests using values to describe niche–regime interaction as a better way to anticipate future niche–regime interactions.

Organizational structure and responsibility: an analysis in a dynamic logic of organized collective agency

Aim of the present paper is to provide a formal characterization of various different notions of responsibility within groups of agents (Who did that? Who gets the blame? Who is accountable for that? etc.). To pursue this aim, the papers proposes an organic analysis of organized collective agency by tackling the issues of organizational structure, role enactment, organizational activities, task-division and task-allocation. The result consists in a semantic framework based on dynamic logic in which all these concepts can be represented and in which various notions of responsibility find a formalization. The background motivation of the work consists in those responsibility-related issues which are of particular interest for the theory and development of multi-agent systems.

The cubicle warrior: the marionette of digitalized warfare

In the last decade we have entered the era of remote controlled military technology. The excitement about this new technology should not mask the ethical questions that it raises. A fundamental ethical question is who may be held responsible for civilian deaths. In this paper we will discuss the role of the human operator or so-called ‘cubicle warrior’, who remotely controls the military robots behind visual interfaces. We will argue that the socio-technical system conditions the cubicle warrior to dehumanize the enemy. As a result the cubicle warrior is morally disengaged from his destructive and lethal actions. This challenges what he should know to make responsible decisions (the so-called knowledge condition). Nowadays and in the near future, three factors will influence and may increase the moral disengagement even further due to the decrease of locus of control orientation: (1) photo shopping the war; (2) the moralization of technology; (3) the speed of decision-making. As a result, cubicle warriors cannot be held reasonably responsible anymore for the decisions they make.

A literature review on new robotics: automation from love to war

This article investigates the social significance of robotics for the years to come in Europe and the US by studying robotics developments in five different areas: the home, health care, traffic, the police force, and the army. Our society accepts the use of robots to perform dull, dangerous, and dirty industrial jobs. But now that robotics is moving out of the factory, the relevant question is how far do we want to go with the automation of care for children and the elderly, of killing terrorists, or of making love? This literature review attempts to provide an engaged but sober (non-speculative) insight into the societal issues raised by the new robotics: which robot technologies are coming; what are they capable of; and which ethical and regulatory questions will they consequently raise?

A logic for reasoning about responsibility

One way to allocate tasks to agents is by ascribing them obligations. From obligations to be, agents are able to infer what are the forbidden, permitted and obligatory actions they may perform, by using the well-known Meyer’s reduction from obligations to be to obligations to do. However, we show through an example that this method is not completely adequate to guide agents’ decisions. We then propose a solution using, instead of obligations, the concept of ‘responsibility’. To formalise responsibility we use a multiagent extension of propositional dynamic logic as framework, and then we define some basic concepts, such as ‘agent ability’, also briefly discussing the problem of uniform strategies and a possible solution. In the last part, we show that our framework can be used in the specification of normative multiagent systems, by presenting an extensive running example.

Military robotics & relationality : criteria for ethical decision-making

In this article, we argue that the implementation of military robots must be preceded by a careful reflection on the ethics of warfare in that warfare must be regarded as a strictly human activity, for which human beings must remain responsible and in control and that ethical decision-making can never be transferred to autonomous robots in the foreseeable future, since these robots are not capable of making ethical decisions. Non-autonomous robots require that humans authorize any decision to use lethal force, i.e., they require a ‘man-in-the-loop’. We propose a model of relationality for the moral attitude that is needed to confront the moral questions and dilemmas that will be faced by future military operations using robots. This model provides two minimal criteria for ethical decision making: non-binary thinking and reflexivity by means of rooting and shifting. In the second part of this article, we apply these criteria to today’s human operators of non-autonomous military robots and secondly, to tomorrow’s autonomous military robots, and ask whether robots are capable of relationality, and to what degree human operators make decisions on the basis of relationality. We then conclude with what we take to be a possible, albeit limited, role for robotics in the military with regard to both the current and the foreseeable future role of military robotics.

Don't Ever Do That! Long-term Duties in PDeL

This paper studies long-term norms concerning actions. In Meyer’s Propositional Deontic Logic (PDeL), only immediate duties can be expressed, however, often one has duties of longer durations such as: “Never do that”, or “Do this someday”. In this paper, we will investigate how to amend PDeL so that such long-term duties can be expressed. This leads to the interesting and suprising consequence that the long-term prohibition and obligation are not interdefinable in our semantics, while there is a duality between these two notions. As a consequence, we have provided a new analysis of the long-term obligation by introducing a new atomic proposition I (indebtedness) to represent the condition that an agent has some unfulfilled obligation.