A New Design Approach and Framework for Elderly Care Robots

A relatively new area within information systems is the design of robotic healthcare. This narrative review considers the question, how does one ethically design an elderly care robot? To answer this question, robot ethicists consider the ethical impact of robots, how designers ought to design robots ethically, and how a robot design ought to be, so its behaviour is ethical. The latter consideration defines another field of study, machine ethics. Machine ethicists ask, how does one design a robot information system to behave ethically? Thus, robot ethics is concerned with the ethics of design practice, whereas machine ethics is concerned with the ethics of the product designed. The findings from this narrative review point the way forward to how one can answer both questions with a new design approach that is grounded in care and professional ethics, value sensitive design, and the integration of two machine ethics schools of thought

More Than Machines? The Attribution of (In)Animacy to Robot Technology

We know that robots are just machines. Why then do we often talk about them as if they were alive? The author explores this fascinating phenomenon, providing a rich insight into practices of animacy (and inanimacy) attribution to robot technology: from science-fiction to robotics R&D, from science communication to media discourse, and from the theoretical perspectives of STS to the cognitive sciences. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, and backed by a wealth of empirical material, the author shows how scientists, engineers, journalists - and everyone else - can face the challenge of robot technology appearing "a little bit alive" with a reflexive and yet pragmatic stance

More Than Machines?

We know that robots are just machines. Why then do we often talk about them as if they were alive? Laura Voss explores this fascinating phenomenon, providing a rich insight into practices of animacy (and inanimacy) attribution to robot technology: from science-fiction to robotics R&D, from science communication to media discourse, and from the theoretical perspectives of STS to the cognitive sciences. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, and backed by a wealth of empirical material, Voss shows how scientists, engineers, journalists - and everyone else - can face the challenge of robot technology appearing »a little bit alive« with a reflexive and yet pragmatic stance

More Than Machines?

We know that robots are just machines. Why then do we often talk about them as if they were alive? Laura Voss explores this fascinating phenomenon, providing a rich insight into practices of animacy (and inanimacy) attribution to robot technology: from science-fiction to robotics R&D, from science communication to media discourse, and from the theoretical perspectives of STS to the cognitive sciences. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, and backed by a wealth of empirical material, Voss shows how scientists, engineers, journalists - and everyone else - can face the challenge of robot technology appearing »a little bit alive« with a reflexive and yet pragmatic stance

Meet your Maker : A Social Identity Analysis of Robotics Software Engineering

Software systems often reflect the values of the people that engineered them: it is vital to understand and engineer those values systematically. This is crucial for autonomous systems, where human interventions are not always possible. The software engineering community shows some positive values - like altruism - and lack others - like diversity. In this project, we propose to elicit the values of the engineers of autonomous systems by analysing the artefacts they produce. We propose to build on the social identity theory to identify encouraged and discouraged behaviours within this collective. Our goal is to understand, diagnose, and improve the engineering culture behind autonomous system development

Robots in Nursing - False Rhetoric or Future Reality?: How might robots contribute to hospital nursing in the future? A qualitative study of the perspectives of roboticists and nurses

Introduction. The challenge of the global nursing shortage coupled with a rising healthcare demand prompts consideration of technology as a potential solution. Technology in the form of robots is being developed for healthcare applications but the potential role in nursing has not been researched in the UK. Methods A three-phased qualitative study was undertaken: interviews with 5 robotic developers (Phase 1); nine focus groups /interviews with 25 hospital Registered Nurses (RN) in Phase 2, and 12 nurse leaders in four focus groups (Phase 3). Data was analysed using framework analysis for Phase 1 and reflexive thematic analysis for Phase 2 and 3 data based on the Fundamentals of Care framework. Results Roboticist interviews confirmed that a taxonomy of potential robotic automation was a useful tool for discussing the role of robots. In Phase 2, RNs described activities that robots might undertake and commented on those which they should not. RNs more readily agreed that robots could assist with physical activities than relational activities. Six potential roles that robots might undertake in future nursing practice were identified from the data and which have been labelled as advanced machine, social companion, responsive runner, helpful co-worker, proxy nurse bot, and feared substitute. Three cross-cutting themes were identified: • a fear of the future; • a negotiated reality and • a positive opportunity. In phase 3, nurse leaders considered the RN results and four themes were identified from their discussions: • First impressions of robot in nursing; • The essence of nursing; • We must do something and • Reframing the future. Conclusions Robots will be a future reality in nursing, playing an assistive role. Nursing must become technically proficient and engage with the development and testing of robots. Nurse leaders must lead policy development and reframe the narrative from substitution to assistance. A number of navigational tools have been developed including a taxonomy of nursing automation and the six robotic roles which may be useful to inform future debate in nursing

Responsible domestic robotics:Exploring ethical implications of robots in the home

Purpose: The vision of robotics in the home promises increased convenience, comfort, companionship, and greater security for users. The robot industry risks causing harm to users, being rejected by society at large, or being regulated in overly prescriptive ways if robots are not developed in a socially responsible manner. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the challenges and requirements for designing responsible domestic robots.Design/methodology/approach: The paper examines definitions of robotics and the current commercial state of the art. In particular it considers the emerging technological trends, such as smart homes, that are already embedding computational agents in the fabric of everyday life. The paper then explores the role of values in design, aligning with human computer interaction and considers the importance of the home as a deployment setting for robots. The paper examines what responsibility in robotics means and draws lessons from past home information technologies. An exploratory pilot survey was conducted to understand user concerns about different aspects of domestic robots such as form, privacy and trust. The paper provides these findings, married with literature analysis from across technology law, computer ethics and computer science.Findings: By drawing together both empirical observations and conceptual analysis, this paper concludes that user centric design is needed to create responsible domestic robotics in the future.Originality/value: This multidisciplinary paper provides conceptual and empirical research from different domains to unpack the challenges of designing responsible domestic robotics

Producing Humans: An Anthropology of Social and Cognitive Robots

In this thesis, I ask how the human is produced in robotics research, focussing specifically on the work that is done to create humanoid robots that exhibit social and intelligent behaviour. Robots, like other technologies, are often presented as the result of the systematic application of progressive scientific knowledge over time, and thus emerging as inevitable, ahistorical, and a-territorial entities. However, as we shall see, the robot’s existence as a recognisable whole, as well as the various ways in which researchers attempt to shape, animate and imbue it ‘human-like’ qualities, is in fact the result of specific events, in specific geographical and cultural locations. Through an ethnographic investigation of the sites in which robotics research takes place, I describe and analyse how, in robotics research, robotics researchers are reflecting, reproducing, producing, and sometimes challenging, core assumptions about what it means to be human. The dissertation draws on three and a half years of ethnographic research across a number of robotics research laboratories and field sites in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States between April 2016 and December 2019. It also includes an investigation of the sites where robotics knowledge is disseminated and evaluated, such as conferences and field test sites. Through a combination of participant and non-participant observation, interviews, and textual analysis, I explore how the robot reveals assumptions about the human, revealing both individual, localised engineering cultures, as well as wider Euro-American imaginaries. In this dissertation, I build on existing ethnographies of laboratory work and technological production, which investigate scientific laboratories as cultural sites. I also contribute to contemporary debates in anthropology and posthumanist theory, which question the foundational assumptions of humanism. While contemporary scholarship has attempted to move beyond the nature/culture binary by articulating a multitude of reconfigurations and boundary negotiations, I argue that this is done by neglecting the body. In order to address this gap, I bring together two complementary conceptual devices. First, I employ the embodiment philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012; 1968) particularly his emphasis on the body as a site of knowing the world. Second, I use the core anthropological concept of the ‘fetish’ as elaborated by William Pietz (1985). By interrogating the robot as ‘fetish’, I elaborate how the robot is simultaneously a territorialised, historicised, personalised, and reified object. This facilitates an exploration of the disparate, and often contradictory nature, of the relations between people and objects. In my thesis, I find many boundary reconfigurations and dissolutions between the human and the robot. However, deviating from the relational ontology dominant in the anthropology of technology, I discover an enduring asymmetry between the human and the robot, with the living body emerging as a durable category that cannot be reasoned away. Thus, my thesis questions how the existing literature might obscure important questions about the category of the human by focusing disproportionately on the blurring and/or blurred nature of human/non-human boundaries. Ultimately, I argue for a collaborative and emergent configuration of the human, and its relationship with the world, that is at once both relational and embodied. This dissertation is structured as follows. An initial introductory chapter is followed by a chapter documenting the literature review and conceptual framework. This is followed by four chapters that correspond to the four aspects of the fetish in Pietz’s model: Historicisation, Territorialisation, Reification and Personalisation. These chapters alternate between scholarly sources and ethnographic data. In Historicisation, using existing scholarship, I trace the history of the robot object, including the continuities and discontinuities that led to its creation, as well as the futures that are implicated in its identity. This is followed by the Territorialisation chapter, in which ethnographic data is used to interrogate the robot’s materiality, as well as the spaces in which it is built, modified, and tested. The next chapter, Reification, considers the robot as a valuable object according to institutions and the productive and ideological systems of Euro-American imaginaries. This chapter integrates ethnographic detail with existing scholarship to focus on contrasts between the dominant image of imminent super-human intelligence and the human interventions and social relationships necessary to produce the illusion of robot autonomy. Finally, the chapter Personalisation brings ethnographic attention to the intensely personal way that the robot-as-fetish is experienced in an encounter with an embodied person, understood through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment philosophy. In the final chapter, I draw together the various strands to articulate how understanding the robot as a fetish, underscored by Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment phenomenology, can provide useful resources for developing an alternative understanding of the human in anthropology without dissolving it all together