Our research team has been investigating methods for enabling robots to behave ethically while interacting with human beings. Our approach relies on two main sources of data for determining what counts as “ethical” behavior. The first are the views of average adults, which we refer to “folk morality”, and the second are the views of ethics experts. Yet the enterprise of identifying what should ground a robot’s decisions about ethical matters raises many fundamental metaethical questions. Here, we focus on one main metaethical question: would reason dedicate that it is more justifiable to base a robot’s decisions on folk morality or the guidance of ethics experts? The goal of this presentation is to highlight some of the arguments for and against each respective point of view, and the implications such arguments might have for the endeavor to encode ethical decision-making processes into robots.
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The Eye of the Robot Beholder: Ethical Risks of Representation, Recognition, and Reasoning over Identity Characteristics in Human-Robot Interaction
Significant segments of the HRI literature rely on or promote the
ability to reason about human identity characteristics, including age,
gender, and cultural background. However, attempting to handle
identity characteristics raises a number of critical ethical concerns,
especially given the spatiotemporal dynamics of these characteristics. In this paper I question whether human identity characteristics
can and should be represented, recognized, or reasoned about by
robots, with special attention paid to the construct of race, due to its
relative lack of consideration within the HRI community. As I will
argue, while there are a number of well-warranted reasons why HRI
researchers might want to enable robotic consideration of identity
characteristics, these reasons are outweighed by a number of key
ontological, perceptual, and deployment-oriented concerns. This
argument raises troubling questions as to whether robots should
even be able to understand or generate descriptions of people, and
how they would do so while avoiding these ethical concerns. Finally,
I conclude with a discussion of what this means for the HRI community, in terms of both algorithm and robot design, and speculate
as to possible paths forward.
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- PAR ID:
- 10403576
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Human-Robot Interaction
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 10
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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