Amy Harmon at the NYT has a good overview of a generation of robots specifically designed to trigger emotional cues in their easily manipulated meatbag slaves, er, that is, people. The key example is Paro, a therapeutic robot baby seal.
Jamais Cascio has suggested this empathic reaction should have moral weight. Like Mencius’ heart of compassion, he plausibly argues it is a marker of the complexity of the synthetic creature and our responsibility to it. Don’t Kick The Robot, Cascio advises. Developing the idea, he proposed it as one of five laws of robot ethics.
While SF stories focus on robots analogous existence to humans, for the forseeable future the link with animals will be far more relevant. Most people, and even philosophers like Peter Singer, suggest an animal has a different moral character to a person due to its lack of awareness about or plans for the future. It’s also worth remembering what most people’s ethical codes allow towards animals: of course empathy and affection, but also humane husbandry for profit, and slaughter for the dinner table. We treat many animals much like we treat these robots: as tools.
Tags: Amy Harmon, Jamais Cascio, Mencius, Paro, Peter Singer, Robot Ethics, 孟子
July 23, 2010 at 7:41 am |
[...] robot chair By conflatedautomatons If a key principle of robot ethics is not kicking the robot, what if the robot is designed to kick itself? This mesmerising chair continually collapses and [...]
January 30, 2011 at 11:18 pm |
[...] It’s not the latest output, but the Euron Roboethic Roadmap (PDF) will serve well enough as an example. Firstly, it’s not really a roadmap, which implies some sort of high level direction: it’s more an exhaustive bullet-pointed list of every permutation in which ethics and robotics might intersect, with the more interestingly science fictional ones glossed over in order to seem serious. The project is almost entirely descriptive, and there are no ethical guidelines here of the type a researcher might use to get their project past a roboethics committee. The first proposed national prescriptive guidelines, due to come out of Korea in 2009, seem to have been abandoned with a change of government. (In the meantime, Jamais Cascio has useful early stab.) [...]