“We cannot work on the development of robots and artificial intelligence - especially when it comes to making autonomous decisions - without considering the consequences for our society and lives.”

Lambèr Royakkers is a professor Ethics of the Digital Society at Eindhoven University of Technology. His research has an interdisciplinary character and deals with the interface between ethics, law and technology, with a particular focus on digitization, robo-ethics and artificial intelligence. The main contribution in his research is dealing with the ethical and legal dilemmas/problems in our digital society which have been leveraged by modern technology. 

He is the coordinator of the course sequence Robots Everywhere, where the main question is: ‘How we can enjoy the benefits of robotics and artificial intelligence while simultaneously avoiding pitfalls, since the development of robotics and artificial intelligence may cause great harm?

Lambèr received his PhD from Tilburg University, with a dissertation on the formalisation of normative rules with deontic logic. Before this, he studied Philosophy and Social Sciences (at the TU/e), Technical Mathematics (at the TU/e), Law (at Tilburg University), and the postgraduate teacher training Master of Education Mathematics (at the TU/e).

From 2007 till 2012 he was also associate professor military ethics at the Netherlands Defence Academy (Breda). Currently he is project leader of the NWO-project ‘Strengthening cyber resilience by technological citizenship', and ethics advisor of several European projects, such as MAGNETO, TERRINet, and CHARMING. He has authored and co-authored over 10 books, including Ethics, Engineering and Technology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), Moral Responsibility and the Problem of Many Hands (Routledge 2015), Just Ordinary Robots (CRC Press 2016), Cyberspace without Conflict (Rathenau Instituut 2019).

• Rathenau Instituut (The Hague)