Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel

In his lecture at the Orient-Institut Istanbul on 18 December 2019, Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel from Zurich, Switzerland is going to deal with care robots as well as therapy and surgery robots. He will present well-known and less known examples and clarify the goals, tasks and characteristics of these service robots in the healthcare sector. Afterwards he will investigate current and future functions of care robots, including sexual assistance functions. Against this background, the lecture is going to consider both the perspective of information ethics and machine ethics. In the end, it should become clear which robot types and prototypes or products are available in healthcare, which purposes they fulfill, which functions they assume, how the healthcare system changes through their use and which implications and consequences this has for the individual and society.

Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel was born in 1968 in Ulm. He studied philosophy as well as information science at the University of Constance and wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of St. Gallen about anthropomorphic software agents. Bendel has been researching information ethics and machine ethics for years. He works as a professor at the School of Business (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland) in Basel, Olten and Brugg-Windisch. Since 1998 he has published over 300 articles, book chapters and books. In 2019, Bendel founded the platform robophilosophy.com in order to gain more attention for the research field of robot philosophy.