Roboethics - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 74

if any, will be to set against these threats. The approach taken to developments in
robotics to date seems to have largely been based on technological determinism
(Ellul 1954 ; Winner 1977 ) with developments taking place because they are possi-
ble without regard to their wider impacts and desirability.
Possibly the most important issues relate to the effects on human society and the
way in which the presence of an intelligent robot population would change it.
A number of different ethical theories discussed in Chap. 2 , including deontological
ethics, utilitarian ethics, the ethics of care and virtue ethics, can usefully be applied
to these questions. The precautionary principle is also relevant. It attempts to
encourage anticipatory environmental protection by identifying the potential for
environmental harm in advance and to remove the need to prove a causal link
between specifi c emissions of substances with a known hazard potential and
observed environmental damage before action is taken to reduce the environmental
damage (Dethlefsen et al. 1993 ). The approach can be extended to anticipatory
reduction of other types of harm, for instance, to social relations and the structure of
society.
While it seems unlikely that a truly intelligent and aware robot will be developed
at any time in the foreseeable future, the possibility raises the ethical issues of the
rights and responsibilities of such a robot. For instance, should an intelligent robot
have the same rights and responsibilities as a person and be treated in the same way?
Do we need to change our attitudes to robots to prevent exploitation of them? It
would be desirable and probably necessary for an intelligent robot to be a moral
agent. Programming 'ethical' behaviour into robots, as suggested by Asimov's
stories, is one possible solution. However, this would remove their 'free will' and,
as illustrated by these stories, is an infl exible approach which frequently leads to
diffi culties in real situations.
The role of the robots of the future could be extended by embedding them into
emerging IT environments characterised by a growing spread of ubiquitous and
cloud computing, communications and ad hoc networks of sensors forming what
has been termed 'ambient intelligence'. However, this raises important ethical
issues related to privacy and security, including of personal data. A number of
potential uses of robots, including in travel aids for blind people, will involve the
use of sensor system to obtain and disclose location-based and context-sensitive
personal information, raising privacy threats. Changing contexts introduce new
privacy threats and make it diffi cult to continuously satisfy privacy requirements.
It will therefore probably be necessary to use adaptive approaches to manage chang-
ing privacy concerns. Privacy threats need to be taken seriously by all users, as
illustrated by the increasing prevalence of digital identity theft (Lynch 2005 ) and
cyberstalking (Spitzberg and Hoobler 2002 ). However, the privacy threats associ-
ated with the use of sensor systems have been underresearched.
It is probably fortunate that currently available robots are far away from this
vision or possibly nightmare of being able to understand their environments, their
goals and their own capabilities or to learn from their experiences. We are probably
even further away from exploring and understanding the underlying ethical issues.