Roboethics - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 95

Robotics is a fast developing area. Both advances in technology and new
applications will give rise to new ethical questions, which will need to be investi-
gated. Currently technological determinism, leading to developments because they
are feasible rather than because they are desirable, and powerful vested interests,
such as the military, have had too much infl uence in determining the nature of devel-
opments in robotics. This needs to change and more attention be given to what is
desirable and benefi cial for both humanity as a whole, including its poorest mem-
bers, and the environment rather than technology development and introduction
being driven purely by what is technologically possible.
There are a number of questions which require further investigation. In particu-
lar, there are many uncertainties with regard to both the short- and long-term impacts
and potential and likely benefi ts and harms of particular uses of robotics, especially
those associated with nano- and femto-scale robots. This complicates evaluation of
the ethical issues and may lead to a focus on issues of low relevance while ignoring
other more important ones. The potential impacts of nano- and femto-scale robots
at the molecular scale make them different in kind from other types of technologies
and may complicate the development of ethical procedures for evaluating their
impacts. Particular investigation is also required of the short- and long-term human
and environmental impacts of the use of nano- and femto-scale robots. Another
important area is the impacts on social relationships of the increasing use of com-
panion and toy robots and how such robots could be used to encourage positive and
more cooperative rather than competitive social behaviours.
Currently robots are machines and therefore raise many of the same ethical
issues as other types of machines. While they are treated as machines, then issues of
responsibility in the case of problems are similar to those for other machines.
Developers should be considered to have a particular responsibility for design which
is easy to use, is reliable and makes it easy to avoid errors. This should include
incorporation of both usability (McLaughlin and Skinner 2000 ; Nielsen 1993 ;
Quesenbery et al. 2001 ) and design-for-all principles (Connell et al. 1997 ; CEN
2003 ). In the case of usability, checkability, low error rates or error tolerance and
design to prevent errors caused by interaction with the user and to help the user
recover from errors, including by checks to ensure that the correct information is
entering and leaving the system, are particularly important. Design-for-all princi-
ples should include design for simple and intuitive use with the design easy to
understand, regardless of the user's experience, knowledge, language skills or cur-
rent level of concentration. Organisations in which robots are used have an ethical
responsibility to avoid the systemic factors which lead to technology failure and are
subsequently generally inappropriately blamed on operators rather than systemic
organisational problems being investigated and corrected (Hersh 2006 ).
As indicated by the discussion of early approaches to roboethics, there is consid-
erable interest in the potential for robots to become autonomous agents, moral or
otherwise. As indicated by the discussion of military robots, some robots are already
able to act with autonomy in limited circumstances. However, there seems to be
particular interest in robots as independent decision makers, implying a consider-
able degree of intelligence. Some independent decision-making would be possible