This chapter outlines the main developments of roboethics 9 years after a worldwide debate on the subject – that is, the applied ethics about ethical, legal, and societal aspects of robotics – opened up. Today, roboethics not only counts several thousands of voices on the Web, but is the issue of important literature relating to almost all robotics applications, and of hundreds of rich projects, workshops, and conferences. This increasing interest and sometimes even fierce debate expresses the perception and need of scientists, manufacturers, and users of professional guidelines and ethical indications about robotics in society.
Some of the issues presented in the chapter are well known to engineers, and less known or unknown to scholars of humanities, and vice versa. However, because the subject is transversal to many disciplines, complex, articulated, and often misrepresented, some of the fundamental concepts relating to ethics in science and technology are recalled and clarified.
A detailed taxonomy of sensitive areas is presented. It is based on a study of several years and referred to by scientists and scholars, the result of which is the Euron Roboethics Roadmap. This taxonomy identifies themost evident/urgent/sensitive ethical problems in the main applicative fields of robotics, leaving more in-depth research to further studies.
Roboethics: Introduction
Author Fiorella Operto
Video ID : 773
Introduction ton Ethical, Legal and Societal issues.
This is the first time in history that humanity is nearing the achievement of replicating an intelligent
and autonomous entity. This compels the scientific community to examine closely the very concept of intelligence – in humans and animals, and of the me- chanical – from a cybernetic standpoint.
In fact, complex concepts like autonomy, learning, consciousness, evaluation, free will, decision making, freedom, emotions, and many others need to be analyzed, taking into account that the same concept may not have, in humans, animals, and machines, the same semantic meaning.
From this standpoint, it can be seen as natural and necessary that robotics draws on several other disciplines, such as logic, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, biology, physiology, philosophy, litera- ture, natural history, anthropology, art, and design.
In fact, robotics de facto combines the so-called two cultural spheres, science and humanities.
The effort to design roboethics should take into account this specificity. This means that experts will consider robotics as a whole - in spite of the current early stage which recalls a melting pot – so they can achieve the vision of robotics’ future.
“Roboethics is an applied ethics whose objective is to develop scientific/cultural/technical tools that can be shared by different social groups and beliefs. These tools aim to promote and encourage the development of robotics for the advancement of human society and individuals, and to help preventing its misuse against humankind.” (Veruggio, 2002)
