Designing Virtuous Sex Robots

We propose that virtue ethics can be used to address ethical issues central to discussions about sex robots. In particular, we argue virtue ethics is well equipped to focus on the implications of sex robots for human moral character. Our evaluation develops in four steps. First, we present virtue ethics as a suitable framework for the evaluation of human–robot relationships. Second, we show the advantages of our virtue ethical account of sex robots by comparing it to current instrumentalist approaches, showing how the former better captures the reciprocal interaction between robots and their users. Third, we examine how a virtue ethical analysis of intimate human–robot relationships could inspire the design of robots that support the cultivation of virtues. We suggest that a sex robot which is equipped with a consent-module could support the cultivation of compassion when used in supervised, therapeutic scenarios. Fourth, we discuss the ethical implications of our analysis for user autonomy and responsibility

Companion robots: the hallucinatory danger of human-robot interactions

The advent of the so-called Companion Robots is raising many ethical concerns among scholars and in the public opinion. Focusing mainly on robots caring for the elderly, in this paper we analyze these concerns to distinguish which are directly ascribable to robotic, and which are instead preexistent. One of these is the “deception objection”, namely the ethical unacceptability of deceiving the user about the simulated nature of the robot’s behaviors. We argue on the inconsistency of this charge, as today formulated. After that, we underline the risk, for human-robot interaction, to become a hallucinatory relation where the human would subjectify the robot in a dynamic of meaning-overload. Finally, we analyze the definition of “quasi-other” relating to the notion of “uncanny”. The goal of this paper is to argue that the main concern about Companion Robots is the simulation of a human-like interaction in the absence of an autonomous robotic horizon of meaning. In addition, that absence could lead the human to build a hallucinatory reality based on the relation with the robot

Designing Robots for Care: Care Centered Value-Sensitive Design

The prospective robots in healthcare intended to be included within the conclave of the nurse-patient relationship—what I refer to as care robots—require rigorous ethical reflection to ensure their design and introduction do not impede the promotion of values and the dignity of patients at such a vulnerable and sensitive time in their lives. The ethical evaluation of care robots requires insight into the values at stake in the healthcare tradition. What’s more, given the stage of their development and lack of standards provided by the International Organization for Standardization to guide their development, ethics ought to be included into the design process of such robots. The manner in which this may be accomplished, as presented here, uses the blueprint of the Value-sensitive design approach as a means for creating a framework tailored to care contexts. Using care values as the foundational values to be integrated into a technology and using the elements in care, from the care ethics perspective, as the normative criteria, the resulting approach may be referred to as care centered value-sensitive design. The framework proposed here allows for the ethical evaluation of care robots both retrospectively and prospectively. By evaluating care robots in this way, we may ultimately ask what kind of care we, as a society, want to provide in the futur

Assistive technology design and development for acceptable robotics companions for ageing years

© 2013 Farshid Amirabdollahian et al., licensee Versita Sp. z o. o. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author.A new stream of research and development responds to changes in life expectancy across the world. It includes technologies which enhance well-being of individuals, specifically for older people. The ACCOMPANY project focuses on home companion technologies and issues surrounding technology development for assistive purposes. The project responds to some overlooked aspects of technology design, divided into multiple areas such as empathic and social human-robot interaction, robot learning and memory visualisation, and monitoring persons’ activities at home. To bring these aspects together, a dedicated task is identified to ensure technological integration of these multiple approaches on an existing robotic platform, Care-O-Bot®3 in the context of a smart-home environment utilising a multitude of sensor arrays. Formative and summative evaluation cycles are then used to assess the emerging prototype towards identifying acceptable behaviours and roles for the robot, for example role as a butler or a trainer, while also comparing user requirements to achieved progress. In a novel approach, the project considers ethical concerns and by highlighting principles such as autonomy, independence, enablement, safety and privacy, it embarks on providing a discussion medium where user views on these principles and the existing tension between some of these principles, for example tension between privacy and autonomy over safety, can be captured and considered in design cycles and throughout project developmentsPeer reviewe

Different discussions on roboethics and information ethics based on different contexts (BA). Discussions on robots, informatics and life in the information era in Japanese\ud bulletin board forums and mass media

In this paper, I will analyze „what sort of invisible reasons lie behind differences of discussions on roboethics and IE (Information Ethics) in Japan and “Western” cultures‟, focusing on (1) the recent trends of researches in roboethics in „Western‟ cultures, (2) the tendencies of portrayal of robots, ICTs, Informatics, life in the information era reflected in news papers reports and talks on BBSs in Japan. As we will see in this paper, Japanese people have difficulty in understanding some of the key concepts used in the fields of roboethics and IE (Information Ethics) such as „autonomy‟ or „responsibility (of robots)‟,etc. This difficulty appears to derive from different types of discussions based on of different cultural contexts (Ba) in which the majority of people in each culture are provided with a certain sort of shared/ normalized frames of narratives. In my view and according to some Japanese critics or authors, senses of „reality‟ of Japanese people are strongly related with "emotional sensitivity to things/persons/events in life" or "direct-non>mediated-intuitive\ud awareness/knowing" (Izutsu, 2001). These tendencies in Japanese minds seem to influence their limited interest in the "abstract" discussions as well\ud as in straightforward emotional expressions with regard to robots and ICTs

Robots and Privacy in Japanese, Thai and Chinese Cultures. \ud Discussions on Robots and Privacy as Topics of Intercultural Information Ethics in ‘Far East’

In this paper, I will analyze ‘cultural meanings and values’ associated with some of the important IIE(intercultural information ethics) topics in ‘Far East, ’i.e. ‘human and robot interaction(HRI)’ and ‘privacy.’ By focusing on these relatively newly emerging topics in ‘Far East,’ I will attempt to make the cultural Ba (locus/place where different\ud meanings of things, events, people’s experiences come together; or frameworks for understanding meanings of phenomena and events) visible through analysis of research data done in Japan, Thailand and China in the past several years. The research data shown in this paper suggest that we can’t understand people’s attitudes toward robots and privacy in ‘Far East’ without taking into consideration people’s broader views on ‘what is a good life?’ and ‘what is a virtuous life?

Beliefs about the Minds of Others Influence How We Process Sensory Information

Attending where others gaze is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of social cognition. The present study is the first to examine the impact of the attribution of mind to others on gaze-guided attentional orienting and its ERP correlates. Using a paradigm in which attention was guided to a location by the gaze of a centrally presented face, we manipulated participants' beliefs about the gazer: gaze behavior was believed to result either from operations of a mind or from a machine. In Experiment 1, beliefs were manipulated by cue identity (human or robot), while in Experiment 2, cue identity (robot) remained identical across conditions and beliefs were manipulated solely via instruction, which was irrelevant to the task. ERP results and behavior showed that participants' attention was guided by gaze only when gaze was believed to be controlled by a human. Specifically, the P1 was more enhanced for validly, relative to invalidly, cued targets only when participants believed the gaze behavior was the result of a mind, rather than of a machine. This shows that sensory gain control can be influenced by higher-order (task-irrelevant) beliefs about the observed scene. We propose a new interdisciplinary model of social attention, which integrates ideas from cognitive and social neuroscience, as well as philosophy in order to provide a framework for understanding a crucial aspect of how humans' beliefs about the observed scene influence sensory processing