Vanderelst, Dieter, Willems, Jurgen. 2020. Can We Agree on What Robots Should be Allowed to Do? An Exercise in Rule Selection for Ethical Care Robots. International Journal of Social Robotics. 12 (5), 1093-1102.
BibTeX
Abstract
Future Care Robots (CRs) should be able to balance a patient’s, often conflicting, rights without ongoing supervision. Many of the trade-offs faced by such a robot will require a degree of moral judgment. Some progress has been made on methods to guarantee robots comply with a predefined set of ethical rules. In contrast, methods for selecting these rules are lacking. Approaches departing from existing philosophical frameworks, often do not result in implementable robotic control rules. Machine learning approaches are sensitive to biases in the training data and suffer from opacity. Here, we propose an alternative, empirical, survey-based approach to rule selection. We suggest this approach has several advantages, including transparency and legitimacy. The major challenge for this approach, however, is that a workable solution, or social compromise, has to be found: it must be possible to obtain a consistent and agreed-upon set of rules to govern robotic behavior. In this article, we present an exercise in rule selection for a hypothetical CR to assess the feasibility of our approach. We assume the role of robot developers using a survey to evaluate which robot behavior potential users deem appropriate in a practically relevant setting, i.e., patient non-compliance. We evaluate whether it is possible to find such behaviors through a consensus. Assessing a set of potential robot behaviors, we surveyed the acceptability of robot actions that potentially violate a patient’s autonomy or privacy. Our data support the empirical approach as a promising and cost-effective way to query ethical intuitions, allowing us to select behavior for the hypothetical CR.
Tags
Press 'enter' for creating the tag- patients
- robots
- ethics
- rule setting
- care robots
Publication's profile
Status of publication | Published |
---|---|
Affiliation | WU |
Type of publication | Journal article |
Journal | International Journal of Social Robotics |
Citation Index | SCI |
Language | English |
Title | Can We Agree on What Robots Should be Allowed to Do? An Exercise in Rule Selection for Ethical Care Robots |
Volume | 12 |
Number | 5 |
Year | 2020 |
Page from | 1093 |
Page to | 1102 |
Reviewed? | Y |
URL | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12369-019-00612-0 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-019-00612-0 |
Open Access | Y |
Open Access Link | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12369-019-00612-0 |
Associations
- People
- Willems, Jurgen (Details)
- External
- Vanderelst, Dieter (University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, United States/USA)
- Organization
- Institute for Public Management and Governance IN (Details)
- Research areas (ÖSTAT Classification 'Statistik Austria')
- 2234 Robotics (Details)
- 2540 Robotics (Details)
- 5234 Administrative science (Details)
- 5308 Management sciences (Details)
- 5351 Public economy (Details)