Robots are a curious sort of thing. On the one hand, they are designed and manufactured technological artifacts. They are things. Yet, and on the other hand, these things are not quite like other things. They seem to have social presence. They are able to talk and interact with us. And many are designed to mimic or simulate the capabilities and behaviors that are commonly associated with human or non-human animal intelligence. Robots, therefore, invite and encourage zoomorphism, anthropomorphism, and even personification. This paper sets out to answer the vexing question: What exactly is a robot? Rather than try to fit robots into the existing moral and legal categories by way of arguing for either their reification or personification, however, the paper will argue for a revolutionary reformulation of the entire system, developing a new approach to technology law and ethics that can scale to the unique opportunities and challenges of the twenty-first century and beyond.
Concern with the potential harmful effects of the implementation of multimodal AI in robots and of AI in general is rising. There is more and more recognition that roboticists should not be left alone with the development of ethical technologies and that they need the support of experts from other disciplines. Interdisciplinary design methods are developed to make sure that the new technologies serve and are respectful of their target users. This paper argues that while methods like value-based design are indeed essential, there are challenges with their application. Risks connected to the unintended use of the technology are likely to be overlooked and some risk mitigation strategies might not be accessible to robot designers. Lastly, the current system does not offer enough support or incentives to engage in a time-consuming although ethical process. However, there are measures that can be introduced to overcome those challenges and make progress towards responsible technology development.
The aim of this contribution is to present the ethical aspects of decision making (DM) in socially assistive robotics (SAR) and discuss the model of active inference (AIF) within this context. The literature has extensively addressed the ethical issues related to SAR, especially concerning trust and justification in the choices and actions made by the robotic agent towards the user and the external environment. However, it is worth considering at a deeper level the technical implementation of DM. Models of AIF recently have been considered attractive for implementing explainable artificial intelligence for DM, with potentially groundbreaking implications for robotics. Indeed, AIF is particularly effective for complex tasks where the dynamics of the robot are uncertain, as these occur in human-robot interaction, and especially in SAR. This contribution tries to provide an encompassing account of the ethical implications of DM for SAR, by focusing on the often overlooked issue of the ethics of technical implementation. We first present the topic of DM for SAR, then discuss relevant ethical implications, and in a third step present the AIF model for DM and its applications in robotics. Finally, we consider whether AIF could serve as a model for implementing ethically sound decision-making processes in socially assistive robotics.
The poster outlines the design of an international transdisciplinary research project (“Establishing Toyota-style Person-centered, Robotics-aided Care System (TPRoCS)”) in partnership with Toyota’s Frontier Research Center and Toyota Central R&D Labs., Inc. The main purpose of TPRoCS is to understand and assess the impact of assistive robots in the healthcare field, with a view to identifying an optimum implementation model for such technologies in care settings. The poster shows some of the preliminary findings from the first year of the study, particularly the interviews with the project leaders and engineers, examining how stakeholders worked together to ensure the environment in the new hospital building where the transport robots fit in with care professionals’ work patterns. The project aims to provide evidence on how assistive robots can affect professionals working in acute care settings in the short-, medium- and long-term and eventually contribute to enhancement of care quality in the hospital. Reflecting the integrative social robotics approach, the poster will touch upon vital issues such as unintended consequences, and value-centered and culturally sensitive design.
Is it possible for humans to have moral obligations to treat social robots in decent ways? This is one of the most important questions in robophilosophy because failing to answer it correctly could lead to the systematic violation of moral obligations, potentially resulting in a moral catastrophe. The three most commonly discussed frameworks for explaining moral obligations toward robots are rights-based accounts, indirect accounts, and relational accounts. After identifying some issues with each of these views, this paper introduces a novel approach, which I call the Associative Account. According to this view, moral obligations toward robots should be understood as associative duties—duties that arise from valuable relationships with robots. This approach allows for directed duties toward robots without requiring the robots to have full moral standing, as the obligations are grounded in the value of the relationship itself. After explaining the basic idea of the Associative Account, I discuss the conditions that must be met for humans to have valuable relationships with robots.
Robotics and AI technologies often have been perceived as radically innovative technologies that likely will cause problematic disruptions of society. In particular, ethical concerns about the simulation of high-level human capacities in social robots have engendered calls for various forms of ‘top-down’ regulation, guided by pre-set values and standards. Working from insights of a case study with mobile robots, we suggest in this discussion paper that we might do better in pursuing responsible innovation bottom-up: Moving among robots with minimal social interaction skills, citizens may practically acquire the technological knowledge that can protect them against anthropomorphizing overinterpretations and inappropriate attachments. We unfold this suggestion in three steps: First, reporting on our case study, we describe the limited role of value considerations among the design goals that currently guide developers and early adopters of mobile robots in the retail industry. Second, based on an observation from an ethnographic pilot study and related HRI research on mobile robots, we derive a proposal for responsible innovation bottom-up, as supervised social experiment and cultural learning. Third, we discuss the proposal, pro and contra.
