Disengagement with ethics in robotics as a tacit form of dehumanisation
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Disengagement with ethics in robotics as a tacit form of dehumanisation Karolina Zawieska1 Received: 24 July 2019 / Accepted: 17 April 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Over the past two decades, ethical challenges related to robotics technologies have gained increasing interest among different research and non-academic communities, in particular through the field of roboethics. While the reasons to address roboethics are clear, why not to engage with ethics needs to be better understood. This paper focuses on a limited or lacking engagement with ethics that takes place within some parts of the robotics community and its implications for the conceptualisation of the human being. The underlying assumption is that the term ‘ethical’ essentially means ‘human’. Thus, this paper discusses a working hypothesis according to which by avoiding to engage with roboethics, roboticists contribute to the tacit dehumanisation process emerging in and outside of robotics. An alternative approach includes ‘lived ethics’ which involves not only incorporating formal ethical approaches into the roboticists’ work but also ‘being’ ethical and actually engaging with ethical reflection and practice. Keywords Roboethics · Roboticists · Dehumanisation · Lived ethics
1 Introduction While the field of roboethics is relatively young, starting from the early 2000s, it has certainly been growing fast. On the one hand, roboethics is an interdisciplinary research field that combines robotics and ethics and it has often been viewed as a special new area of applied ethics. The field has been dominated by philosophers and professional ethicists in the first place, lawyers as well as robotics engineers and computer scientists. On the other hand, roboethics can also be seen as the area of policy-making and regulatory efforts being made with the goal to develop ethical principles, guidelines, standards and regulations for robot developers and robot users in both the private and public sector [for a detailed review see for example (Tzafestas 2018; Winfield 2019)]. This is because nowadays a common goal for robotics research and industry is to bring robotic systems outside the laboratories and integrate them into the human everyday environments, including into the areas and from the perspectives traditionally associated with humans only. * Karolina Zawieska [email protected] 1
Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
As a research field, roboethics covers a large variety of perspectives and disciplines that significantly vary in their focus and approach (Dodig-Crnkovic and Çürüklü 2012; Tzafestas 2018), with different levels of conceptualising roboethics and the link between ethics and robotics (Asaro 2006; Veruggio et al. 2011) as well as a different understanding of what roboethics actually is (Wynsberghe and Sharkey 2016). Also, different types of robots inevitably require taking different ethical perspectives [e.g. care robot ethics (Santo
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