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Roboethics: Social and Ethical Implications of Robotics

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Book cover Springer Handbook of Robotics

Abstract

The present chapter outlines the main social and ethical issues raised by the ever-faster application of robots to our daily life, and especially to sensitive human areas.

Applied to society in numbers and volumes larger than today, robotics is going to trigger widespread social and economic changes, opening new social and ethical problems for which the designers, the end user, the public, and private policy must now be prepared.

Starting from a philosophical and sociological review of the depth and extent of the two lemmas of robotics and robot, this section summarizes the recent facts and issues about the relationship between techno-science and ethics.

The new applied ethics, called roboethics, is presented. It was put forward in 2001/2002, and publicly discussed in 2004 during the First International Symposium on Roboethics.

Some of the issues presented in the chapter are well known to engineers, and less or not known to scholars of humanities, and vice versa. However, because the subject is complex, articulated, and often misrepresented, some of the fundamental concepts relating ethics in science and technology are recalled and clarified.

At the conclusion of the chapter is presented a detailed taxonomy of the most significant ethical legal, and societal issues in Robotics. This study is based on the Euron Roboethics Roadmap, and it is the result of three years of discussions and research by and among roboticists and scholars of Humanities. This taxonomy identifies the most evident/urgent/sensitive ethical problems in the main applicative fields of robotics, leaving deeper analysis to further studies.

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Abbreviations

ACM:

Association of Computing Machinery

ACM:

active cord mechanism

AI:

artificial intelligence

AMA:

artificial moral agents

ASM:

advanced servomanipulator

AUV:

autonomous underwater vehicles

CAT:

computer-aided tomography

CE:

computer ethics

CPSR:

computer professional for social responsibility

ICT:

information and communication technology

IE:

information ethics

IEEE:

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

ISO:

International Organization for Standardization

LAN:

local-area network

PAPA:

privacy, accuracy, intellectual property, and access

PET:

positron emission tomography

RAS:

Robotics and Automation Society

RCR:

responsible conduct of research

TC:

technical committee

UAV:

unmanned aerial vehicles

WG:

world graph

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Istituto di Elettronica e di Ingegneria dellʼInformazione e delle Telecomunicazioni, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via De Marini 6, 16149, Genova, Italy

    Gianmarco Veruggio Dr.

  2. Scuola di Robotica, Piazza Monastero 4, 16149, Sampierdarena, Genova, Italy

    Fiorella Operto Dr.

Authors
  1. Gianmarco Veruggio Dr.
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  2. Fiorella Operto Dr.
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Gianmarco Veruggio Dr. or Fiorella Operto Dr. .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. PRISMA Lab, Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universitá degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, 80125, Napoli, Italy, Via Claudio 21

    Bruno Siciliano Prof.

  2. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, 94305-9010, Stanford, CA, USA

    Oussama Khatib Prof.

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag

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Veruggio, G., Operto, F. (2008). Roboethics: Social and Ethical Implications of Robotics. In: Siciliano, B., Khatib, O. (eds) Springer Handbook of Robotics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30301-5_65

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30301-5_65

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-23957-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-30301-5

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