Roboethics - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 81

2. A robot must take orders from authorised representatives of the government or
giant corporations, except when their results would be in confl ict with the third
law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence at any price, because a robot is terribly
expensive.

Application of Asimov's laws would considerably improve the functioning of
many police forces across the world which resort to the use of force unnecessarily
and carry out various abuses, particularly against members of minority groups.
However, it would lead to uncertainty and an inability to act in the limited number
of cases in which it is necessary to restrain someone in order to prevent them from
causing harm to themselves or others.

4.2 Wider Approaches to Roboethics

Developments in robotics to date have been based on mathematics, science and
engineering. However, discussion of roboethics in both its narrower and wider
senses requires a contribution from the humanities, including ethics, philosophy and
theology, as well as the biological sciences, including physiology and neuroscience.
Roboethics could thus be considered to span a range of different fi elds and requires
expertise in both science and engineering and the humanities.
The main issues in roboethics are the much wider issues relating to decisions on
what types of applications of robots can be implemented ethically, as well as the
process of implementation to ensure that they are ethical in practice. The following
commonly used defi nition of roboethics by Veruggio ( 2002 ) does allow for this wider
understanding, particularly as modifi ed by the authors to include the impacts on
other species and the environment: 'Roboethics is an applied ethics whose objective
is to develop scientifi c/cultural/technical tools that can be shared by different social
and technological groups. These tools aim to promote and encourage the develop-
ment [including the latest developments] of robotics for the advancement of human
society and individuals [and protection of other species and the environment and to
help preventing its misuse against humankind [other species and the environment].'

5 Illustration of Ethical Issues

The current and future applications of robots present both numerous opportunities
and many threats. Unfortunately, a number of applications raise ethical issues and
in some cases the appropriate solution should be not to proceed. In this section some
of the ethical issues associated with robots are illustrated through discussion of
particular applications. An overview of some of the benefi ts and problems, as well
as possible ethical solutions or recommendations, is presented in Table 3.1 , follow-
ing which the ethical issues in some of these applications are discussed in detail.