Service robots, care ethics, and design

A Van Wynsberghe

doi:10.1007/s10676-016-9409-x

Abstract

It should not be a surprise in the near future to encounter either a personal or a professional service robot in our homes and/or our work places: according to the International Federation for Robots, there will be approx 35 million service robots at work by 2018. Given that individuals will interact and even cooperate with these service robots, their design and development demand ethical attention. With this in mind I suggest the use of an approach for incorporating ethics into the design process of robots known as Care Centered Value Sensitive Design (CCVSD). Although this approach was originally and intentionally designed for the healthcare domain, the aim of this paper is to present a preliminary study of how personal and professional service robots might also be evaluated using the CCVSD approach. The normative foundations for CCVSD come from its reliance on the care ethics tradition and in particular the use of care practices for: (1) structuring the analysis and, (2) determining the values of ethical import. To apply CCVSD outside of healthcare one must show that the robot has been integrated into a care practice. Accordingly, the practice into which the robot is to be used must be assessed and shown to meet the conditions of a care practice. By investigating the foundations of the approach I hope to show why it may be applicable for service robots and further to give examples of current robot prototypes that can and cannot be evaluated using CCVSD.

Highlights

In previous works I have argued in favor of a robust proactive framework for incorporating ethics into the design and implementation of robots named the Care Centered Value Sensitive Design (CCVSD) approach (van Wynsberghe 2012, 2013, 2015)
Robots in healthcare are a main area of development in robotics at the time of this paper (2016), according to the International Federation for Robotics (IFR), more than 4.7 million service robots were sold for personal and domestic use in 2014, including a 542 percent increase in assistive robots for the elderly and disabled
We may engage in the same kind of ethical evaluation for professional and personal service robots as we do for healthcare robots

Summary

Introduction

In previous works I have argued in favor of a robust proactive framework for incorporating ethics into the design and implementation of robots named the Care Centered Value Sensitive Design (CCVSD) approach (van Wynsberghe 2012, 2013, 2015). The ethical dimension of the CC framework, and the CCVSD approach overall, is not to focus entirely on the consequences of the robot’s actions nor to focus on certain duties that the engineer must abide by, or the robot must adhere to; rather, the approach echoes the care ethics perspective in that it focuses on promoting values inherent in the relationships, roles, and responsibilities of the practice at hand Most importantly, it focuses on the relational nature of care activities. Value Analysis of care practice prior to the robot to create a scenario for comparison

Scenario comparison

Findings

Conclusion