Roboethics - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 94

the robot and its resistance to temperature, humidity and other environmental
conditions will determine its life span.
5. Design to minimise energy use, including various power management options.
6. End-of-life management (Kopacek and Kopacek 2013 ) based on reuse, refur-
bishment or upgrading and recycling, supplemented by energy recovery, with the
preference for reuse or refurbishment. Robots should therefore be designed to
facilitate upgrading and recycling, for instance, through a modular design and
design for easy dismantling.

While the use of robots to replace human workers will generally have energy
consumption costs related to robot use, their use may lead to reductions in energy
and resource use, emissions and/or waste which can be set against this. More gener-
ally, the use of advanced technologies such as robots can have positive environmen-
tal impacts over the whole life cycle, but this will require appropriate design and
implementation (Hersh 1998 ).

8 Conclusions

The chapter has discussed various ethical issues related to the (widespread) use of
robots from an informed technological perspective. A brief overview of some of the
main developments in robotics and some of the main applications of robots was
provided as a background for the informed discussion of ethical issues. A number
of potential future applications of robots were introduced and some of the associ-
ated ethical issues discussed. Introductory ideas in roboethics based on Asimov's
( undated ) laws of robotics were presented and their limitations as an approach to
roboethics considered, including the limitations of focussing largely on ethical
issues associated with robot behaviour. This was followed by the presentation of a
wider defi nition of roboethics by Veruggio ( 2002 ) with modifi cations by the authors
to move to a wider than purely human-centric perspective and explicitly mention the
environment. This defi nition covers the wider ethical implications of robots and, in
particular, the ethical issues associated with particular types of applications, includ-
ing whether certain types of application should not be implemented on ethical
grounds. A number of the theories of ethics presented in Chap. 2 of the topic were
applied to highlight some of the ethical issues associated with robotics.
A table of the benefi ts, potential problems and possible ethical solutions for a
number of different types of robots was presented, and some of the underlying ethi-
cal issues were illustrated by discussion of examples of a number of applications,
not all of which were considered to be ethical. In particular, the problems with mili-
tary robotics were noted and it was suggested that research and implementation in
this area should cease. This was further highlighted in the subsection on military
uses of robotics. The impacts of robots on the environment were also discussed and
suggestions made for reducing their environmental footprint over the life cycle.