Challenging Robot Morality: An Ethical Debate on Humanoid Companions, Dataveillance, and Algorithms

In this thesis, I reflect on ethical, moral, and agenthood debates around social and humanoid robots in two ways. I focus on how the technological agency of social robots is understood in ethical canons by shifting from moral concerns in Robot Ethics to data-related ethical concerns in Media and Surveillance Studies. I then move to wider debates on morality, agenthood, and agencies in Machine and Computer Ethics research, so as to highlight that social robots, other robots, machines, and algorithmic structures are often moralised but not understood ethically. In that vein, I distinguish between these two terms to point to a wider critique on the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic tendency in ethical streams, so as to view technology from a morality-aligned standpoint. I undertake a critical survey of current ethical streams and, by doing so, I establish a transdisciplinary ethical discussion around social robots and algorithmic agencies. I undertake this research in two steps. First, I look at the use of humanoid social robots in elderly care, as discussed in Robot Ethics, and expand it with a view from Media and Surveillance Studies on data concern around robots. I hereby examine the social robot and the allocation of its ethical and moral agency as an anthropomorphised and humanoid companion, data tracking device, and Posthumanist ethical network of agencies. This is done to amplify the ethical concerns around its pseudo-agenthood and its potential position as dataveillance. Next, I move on to streams in the Philosophy of Technology (POT) and Machine/Computer Ethics. Here, I discuss concepts on machinic moral agency in digital systems. As I pass from the social robot as a humanoid pseudo-agent towards moralised algorithmic structures, I lay out wider conflicts in morality research streams. Specifically, I address their epistemological simplification and reduction of moral norms to digital code, as well as the increasing dissolvement of accountable agenthood within algorithmic systems. By creating a transdisciplinary investigation on techno-ethical and techno-moral canons and their agency models, I urge for a holistic ethics that, first, gives a greater focus to human agent accountability and moral concerns in the application of robots and, second, negotiates new moral or social norms around the use of robots or digital media structures. This is aligned with increasing concerns around the growing commodification of health data and the lack of transparency on data ownership and privacy infringement.University of Plymout

On Care Robots and the Ethics of Tracking

This paper establishes a transdisciplinary exploration of care robots and their tracking capacity as an ethical performance. It does this to highlight the concerns around the ubiquity and availability of data in care contexts. In my attempt to scrutinise care robots beyond being humanoid and sociable actors, but instead as data tracking technologies, I link robot ethics, media and surveillance studies with posthuman and performative ethics to redefine tracking as an ethical microcosm within care robots. I do this, first, by challenging how to look at care robots and robot interactivity, particularly in reference to tracking as an ethical, not necessarily moral, question of interactivity and relationality. This angle will challenge the ethical timing and evaluation around tracking as an inherently ethical relation. Second, by arguing that the common ethical views on tracking are about concerns of privacy intrusion and data infringement while overlooking that a main ethical issue might not be a robotic intention to spy but the availability of data because of robots. Consequently, what deserves more attention in the ethics of robots is the growing ubiquity of care robots, the sensitivity of care contexts, and the acknowledgement of data appropriation; the latter being especially important considering the vulnerability of health care environments, and the growing commercial value of health data

On Spillikin – A Love Story: Issues around the Humanoid Robot as a Social Actor on Stage

The inclusion of media technology in theatrical plays (Saltz, 2013) follows a contingent fascination and entanglement between human actors, technology and automata (Reilly, 2011) on stage. The contemporary play Spillikin – A Love Story places a new digital ‘actor’ in this debate: the humanoid robot as a socially interactive agent (Breazeal, 2002; Fong, Nourbakhsh, & Dautenhahn, 2003) and caring companion. This paper discusses the exhibition of sociability through the robot’s humanlike gestures and its ability to decipher human gestures on stage. The aim is to point to the ethical consequences for the audience concerning the robot’s implied autonomy to interact socially

On ‘Spillikin – A Love Story’: Issues around the Humanoid Robot as a Social Actor on Stage

The inclusion of media technology in theatrical plays (Saltz, 2013) follows a contingent fascination and entanglement between human actors, technology and automata (Reilly, 2011) on stage. The contemporary play Spillikin – A Love Story places a new digital ‘ac⁠tor’ in this debate: the humanoid robot as a socially interactive agent (Breazeal, 2002; Fong, Nourbakhsh, & Dautenhahn, 2003) and caring companion. This paper discusses the exhibition of sociability through the robot’s humanlike gestures and its ability to decipher human gestures on stage. The aim is to point to the ethical consequences for the audience concerning the robot’s implied autonomy to interact socially

Off the Lip Conference - Transdisciplinary Approaches to Cognitive Innovation. Conference Proceedings

The promise of cognitive innovation as a collaborative project in the sciences, arts and humanities is that we can approach creativity as a bootstrapping cognitive process in which the energies that shape the poem are necessarily indistinguishable from those that shape the poet. For the purposes of this conference the exploration of the idea of cognitive innovation concerns an understanding of creativity that is not exclusively concerned with conscious human thought and action but also as intrinsic to our cognitive development. As a consequence, we see the possibility for cognitive innovation to provide a theoretical and practical platform from which to address disciplinary differences in ways that offer new topics and concerns for research in the sciences and the humanities.The Off the Lip conference was funded by the FP7 Marie Curie Action ITN CogNov