Abstract
Socially interactive robots in a variety of forms and function are quickly becoming part of everyday life and bring with them a host of applied ethical issues. This paper concerns meta-ethical implications at the interface among robotics, ethics, psychology, and the social sciences. While guidelines for the ethical design and use of robots are necessary and urgent, meeting this exigency opens up the issue of whose values and vision of the ideal society inform public policies. The paper is organized as a sequence of questions: Can robots be agents of cultural transmission? Is a cultural shift an issue for roboethics? Should roboethics be an instrument of (political) social engineering? How could biases of the technological imagination be avoided? Does technological determinism compromise the possibility of moral action? The answers to these questions are not straightforwardly affirmative or negative, but their contemplation leads to heeding C. Wright Mills’ metaphor of the cheerful robot.
Highlights
We inhabit a world in which ‘social’ gadgets cheerfully interact with humans
A characterization of life in the 1950s as an overwhelming accumulation of gadgets may bring a smile in the 2010s, but the issues raised by Mills remain pertinent, if not more urgent, in this era of unprecedented acceleration of new technologies that are transforming our lifestyles and our self-understanding and possibly human nature itself
Announcing the birth of roboethics in 2005, Veruggio provoked his audience to consider whether ethical issues with respect to robots should remain a matter for stakeholders’ own consciences or be construed as ‘a social problem to be addressed at institutional level’ [4] (p. 2)
Summary
We inhabit a world in which ‘social’ gadgets cheerfully interact with humans. This paper’s title, alludes to the metaphorical sense in which sociologist C. Announcing the birth of roboethics in 2005, Veruggio provoked his audience to consider whether ethical issues with respect to robots should remain a matter for stakeholders’ own consciences or be construed as ‘a social problem to be addressed at institutional level’ [4] Since 2005, the march of robots into our midst has been increasingly recognized as a social problem to be addressed at the institutional level. This opens up the axiological issue of whose values and vision of the ideal society inform public policies. The following is organized as a sequence of questions that signpost a few salient issues that emerge at the interface among robotics, ethics, psychology, and the social sciences
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