Carebots and the good life - 3TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology

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Note that the interviews will be explorative, and that in the course of the project feedback will be given to designers and researchers of the Centre of Excellence for Intelligent Mechatronic Systems (see also below). b. Ethical evaluation. As existing work such as the Roboethics Roadmap shows, ethics of robotics is a young field, and ethics of robotics and health care too (in contrast perhaps to computing and health care, or tele-surgery, which appears to receive more attention). Usually it is done from an ‘applied ethics’ perspective, by applying a moral theory, e.g. a Kantian theory (Decker 2007). More interesting than such a ‘top-down’ approach is an emphasis on the implications of human-robot interactions for the quality of care and the needs of the receivers of care. For example, Robert and Linda Sparrow have argued that employing carebots to assist older persons would most likely lower the amount of human contact experienced by them, that this would be detrimental to their well-being, and that it would be unethical to substitute robot simulacra for genuine social interaction (Sparrow and Sparrow 2006). But what is well-being? What is ‘genuine’ social interaction? Do designers force their view of what constitutes an appropriate interaction on to users (Whitbey 2006)? What should be an ‘appropriate’ relation between humans, and between humans and technology? Do carebots really contribute to the quality of our lives? To what extent is human flourishing dependent on human-human interaction, and are carebots a threat to this? Such questions point to the problem of ‘the good life’ as formulated by ancient and contemporary philosophers. Instead of asking only ‘What is the right thing to do?’, ethics is broadened to questions regarding how we should live our lives. In this project ethical evaluation will refer to various definitions what a ‘good life’ consists in; it will be interpreted in a pluralistic way. This implies that the scenarios will be assessed using several visions of the good life. Potential tensions between the results will be discussed. This approach to ethics is empirically informed in the sense that it uses information from interviews and studies of human-robot interaction to arrive at a better understanding of the moral issues involved and to develop an ethical framework to regulate the design and use of carebots. It will challenge existing approaches in health care ethics, which limitations it will show. It is inspired by various theoretical frameworks and concepts, such as reflective equilibrium, pragmatist moral imagination, phenomenology of technology (e.g. Verbeek 2000) , and the ancient understanding of ethics as being concerned with the question how we should live our lives. But instead of starting from theory, it will start from existing studies of human-robot interaction. As such, it will further develop existing work in the domain of ethics of human interaction with robots, such as work done in the context of the ETHICBOTS project (a European FP6 project, see http://ethicbots.na.infn.it/index.php), the School of Robotics (Genova), and the IEEE Robotics and Automation's Technical Committee on Robo-Ethics. The project will also benefit from existing work on the replaceability issue, such as the interdisciplinary technology assessment project ‘Robotik. Optionen der Ersetzbarkeit des Menschen’ from the Europäische Akademie zur Erforschung von Folgen wissenschaftlich-technischer Entwicklungen (Decker 2006). Furthermore, the links between ethical and anthropological issues will be explored with regard to human-robot relations. For example, Russo asks how biomechatronic systems may change our understanding of the human body and human nature, employing an absolute distinction between natural and artificial (Russo 2006).Reflection on the good life also involves questioning assumptions on who we are, as humans. c. Special attention will be paid to the ethical aspects of interactions between humans and humanoid robots in health care. Not only do humans often see their interaction with 4
machines in anthropomorphic terms (Whitbey 2006), robots are also often made to look and behave like humans. With regard to this category of interaction the approach of the project differs considerably from the usual philosophical interest in humanoid robots and artificial intelligence. It does not start with questions such as the ‘ghost in the machine’ problem and its responses, with the problem of representation (Clark and Grush 1999), rationality (Clark 2001), or ‘soul issues’ (Epstein 1999: 227). I am not primarily interested in how the robot’s ‘mind’ works (Ishii 2006), but in how humans can enhance their life and existence. Instead of a philosophy of mind I turn to a philosophy of (inter)action and of the good life, that is, what robots do (to us) and how we should live our lives with them. It is a turn from the ‘inside’ and the ‘real’ to the ‘external’ and ‘appearance’. I have less interest in what can happen to robots (how shall we act towards hem, will they ever be able to feel pain, should we grant them robot rights, etc.) than what they do to us, humans – here: people who need care. Thus, the project’s focus concerns interaction, and especially social or quasi-social interaction and its implications for human life and existence, in the life of those who receive care. Ethics of the good life (human flourishing) and existence will be combined with a phenomenological approach, which opposes the dominant scientism. For example, Christopher Ramey has proposed a ‘personal’ ethics of human-android interaction, although I will challenge his claim that we need to recognize a reciprocal relationship of selves with regard to such an interaction (Ramey 2005). Empirical studies will be used in order to understand interaction with android robots. For example, it may suffice for a designer to “hint at certain capabilities that meet our expectations of a socially intelligent entity” (Duffy 2003: 185), rather than trying to blur the boundary between humans and robots. ‘Real’ differences only partly matter in interaction: research shows that ‘human users end up treating humanoid social robots as humans even though they are aware of the asymmetrical nature of such interactions’ (Zhao 2006). An experiment in human-robot interaction explored the minimal requirements for effective human-robot social interaction (Bruce, Nourbakhsh and Simmons 2002). Consider also design-driven discussions concerning emotional responses to humanoid robots sparked off by Mori’s ‘Uncanny Valley’ hypothesis (Mori 1970), emotional models used by designers of humanoids robots such as Kismet (Breazeal 2003), and human-‘service social robot’ interaction and user perception (Lisetti, Brown, Alvarez and Marpaung 2004). Although such studies neglect the ethical question asked above (how does this kind of interaction contribute to the good life) and can therefore be a starting point only, they are essential for us to understand what does and may go on when robots play a role in (health) care. The theoretical framework of this project will be further developed in the course of the project. For this purpose, the PhD candidate will engage with contemporary discussions about ‘good life’ theories in ethics, and further explore how they can be fruitfully combined with empirical research and philosophy of technology. Scientific and social relevance This project will contribute to academic and societal aims in several ways: 1. It can contribute to the methodological discussion within ethics, e.g. about the role of imagination, scenarios, principles, and empirical research in ethical reflection. 2. Its ethical evaluation can aid designers of carebots in their choices of what such robots should do, how they should look, and how they should interact with humans. 5
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