Roboethics

Abstract

Robotics is a very fast growing field and presents us with both a number of exciting possibilities and the threat of significant changes to society, possibly in unforeseeable and undesirable directions. The chapter discusses the associated ethical issues. It is introduced by definitions and statistics on different types of robots and continues to a brief overview of some of the main technological developments and current and probable future applications of robots. The concept of roboethics is then introduced and the limitations of early approaches based on Asimov´s (undated) Laws of Robotics is noted. However, the more general definition (Veruggio and Operto, 2008) is able to cover the wider social implications of the introduction of robots and could be extended to include the impacts on the environment and other species. The ethical issues of current and future applications of robots are illustrated by a number of examples covering a wide range of applications, including health care, military robots and toy and companion robots. A number of the ethical theories presented in chapter 2 are then applied to the evaluation of several of the applications of robots.