This paper proposes and reflects on a teaching methodology for introducing relational ethics in the engineering curriculum based on a pilot at TU Delft in the Netherlands in a course for robotics engineers. Differently from prevalent models of ethics courses, we shifted from having students apply ethical theories to technologies to having them reflect on different aspects of human-robot relations from a more-than-human perspective. This redesign was prompted by conceptual and practical motivations related to (1) a lack of methodological examples of relational ethics in engineering ethics education, (2) a call for more experiential education, and (3) a push to re-evaluate course assessment due to Generative AI. Aside from the lecture content, students explored various dimensions of relational ethics in a thinking-through-doing manner by crafting a companion robot in the tutorials. This culminated in an individual essay in which students reflected on the question ‘How to live well with robots?,’ reflecting on their developing relations with their robotic companion and supported by visual evidence of their human-robot interactions throughout the course. Finally, we provide reflections on this experimental course redesign, outlining several considerations for those intending to integrate relational ethics into their curricula and suggesting avenues for further work.

Real-world technology research involves testing technologies in natural and uncontrolled environments that are (or resemble) the intervention's use setting. As research with technologies under real-world conditions has become a pervasive phenomenon in our public streets, homes, shops, jobs, and social media, scholars have drawn attention to its ethical concerns and the absence of research ethics governance, such as ethics guidelines and independent oversight. In the absence of research ethics for real-world research, scholars have evaluated various real-world research examples with existing research ethics principles and norms and have called for codes of ethics. However, this scholarship faces at least two shortcomings. First, this scholarly attention is fragmented across different disciplines, potentially at the expense of common ethical concerns and guardrails that should be applied to all real-world research formats, irrespective of their domain. Second, it is unclear whether existing research ethics norms – developed for (predominantly) controlled (human subject)scientific research – can capture the full range of ethical challenges shared by all research in the real world, potentially overlooking ethical concerns outside the proverbial lab. In this thesis, I provide a comprehensive analysis of real-world research to address these two gaps. I ask in which ways common ethical challenges emerge in research under real-world conditions, and in what ways research ethics principles and norms fail to account for these ethical challenges. I argue that real-world research shares common ethical salient characteristics, such as ‘coupling’ options to subjects, that need research ethics governance, but that the content of this research ethics governance cannot be wholly based on existing research ethics principles and norms. This is because real-world research raises novel ethical challenges, and existing research ethics norms, such as informed consent or the right to withdraw, cannot be upheld without severely altering the practice. This thesis, thus, lays the groundwork for an ethics of real-world research by developing its philosophical foundations and identifying common challenges to research under real-world conditions that such an ethics should take into account.

Research under real-world conditions is crucial to the development and deployment of robust AI systems. Exposing large language models to complex use settings yields knowledge about their performance and impact, which cannot be obtained under controlled laboratory conditions or through anticipatory methods. This epistemic need for real-world research is exacerbated by large-language models’ opaque internal operations and potential for emergent behavior. However, despite its epistemic value and widespread application, the ethics of real-world AI research has received little scholarly attention. To address this gap, this paper provides an analysis of real-world research with LLMs and generative AI, assessing both its epistemic value and ethical concerns such as the potential for interpersonal and societal research harms, the increased privatization of AI learning, and the unjust distribution of benefits and risks. This paper discusses these concerns alongside four moral principles influencing research ethics standards: non-maleficence, beneficence, respect for autonomy, and distributive justice. I argue that real-world AI research faces challenges in meeting these principles and that these challenges are exacerbated by absent or imperfect current ethical governance. Finally, I chart two distinct but compatible ways forward: through ethical compliance and regulation and through moral education and cultivation.

Testing emerging technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, predictive crime analytics, and smart city interventions under real-world conditions is an important strategy for robust and responsible technology development. However, the moral responsibilities of researchers towards the public when conducting such real-world experiments are often left unaddressed and unregulated. This article argues that there are problematic inconsistencies in research ethics demands and protections across different categories of research and development with emerging digital technologies. This differential treatment is problematic since there are no meaningful differences to justify it, and it creates the possibility of regulatory evasion at the cost of populations’ due protection. Hence, I argue that this differential treatment should be amended by harmonizing research ethics demands. In doing so, this paper contributes to several ongoing scholarly debates on the limits of current research ethics guidelines and protocols in the face of novel technologies and research formats.

Due to an increased presence of robots in human-inhabited environments, we observe a growing body of examples in which humans show behavior that is indicative of strong social engagement towards robots that do not possess any life-like realism in appearance or behavior. In response, we focus on the under-explored concept of a common locus as a relevant driver for a robot passing a social threshold. The key principle of common locus is that sharing place and time with a robotic artifact functions as an important catalyst for a perception of shared experiences, which in turn leads to bonding. We present BlockBots, minimal cube-shaped robotic artifacts that are deployed in an unsupervised, open-ended and in-the-field experimental setting aimed to explore the relevance of this concept. Participants host the BlockBot in their domestic environment before passing it on, without necessarily knowing they are taking part in an experiment. Qualitative data suggest that participants make identity and mind attributions to the BlockBot. People that actively maintain a common locus with BlockBot by taking it with them when changing location, on trips and during outdoor activities, project more of these attributes than others.

Homes are increasingly being built as sensor-laden living environments to test the performance of novel technologies in interaction with real people. When people’s homes are turned into the site of experiments, the inhabitants become research subjects. This paper employs findings from biomedical research ethics to evaluate live-in laboratories and argues that when live-in laboratories function as a participant’s main residence, they constrain an individual’s so-called ‘right to withdraw’. Withdrawing from the live-in laboratory as a participant’s main residence means losing one’s home, which creates negative financial and psychological consequences for participants. I will argue that such costs conflict with a participants’ right to withdraw on two counts. First, that the exit costs from the live-in laboratory constitute a penalty, and second, that the costs of withdrawing from the live-in laboratory function as a constraint on a participant’s liberty. The paper concludes that (i) the right to withdraw is a necessary condition for the ethical permissibility of modern live in lab experiments and conclude (ii) the practice of making an experimental home as a participant’s main residence is ethically problematic.