“We do not very well understand what justifies imposing risk on others. This partly explains the widespread and unquestioning acceptance of morally problematic traffic risks.”

Jilles Smids is a Post-Doctoral researcher at the Philosophy& Ethics group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His main area of research is applied ethics, in particular ethics of technology. He is fascinated with the problem of acceptable risk imposition: why is intentional killing almost always morally wrong, while imposing non-negligent risk of death is often considered morally permissible? His work focusses on the ethics of risk, traffic risks, the ethics of self-driving cars, the ethics of behaviour change technologies, the impact of robotization on meaningful work, blame and responsibility issues in human-robot collaboration, and robot ethics more generally.

Jilles Smids studied Philosophy and Chemistry at Utrecht University. In 2018, he defended his PhD-thesis at the Eindhoven University of Technology. His thesis was on ethical issues of 'persuasive technology', or, behavior change technology. Currently, he works on the project "Robots in the warehouse”, which investigates how the introduction of robots into logistic warehouses might impact the meaningfulness of work and worker well-being, and related ethical issues.