Eco-socio-botics 2022: Social Robotics for sustainability
Workshop, 16th December 2022
organized by
Ilaria Alfieri, Antonio Fleres, Luisa Damiano
A satellite workshop of the International Conference of Social Robotics 2022 (ICSR2022), 13-16 December 2022
Talk Details:
Twenty Years of Roboethics: Social Robots, for Real
Gianmarco Veruggio
CNR-IEIIT, Genova & Scuola di Robotica, Genoa
Abstract
Twenty years after I proposed the keyword Roboethics, we need to reconsider the scope of this new applied ethics in the light of developments in service robotics for personal use and applications of AI in robotics.
Roboethics was intended as an applied ethics to promote the development of robotics for the advancement of human society and individuals, and to assist in preventing its misuse. It analyses the risks associated with the use of robots associated with possible human rights violations.
Born in 2002 and developed in collaboration with philosophers, sociologists, ethicists, psychologists, Roboethics is today an ethics applied to advanced robotics that is also used as an element of evaluation in European and international projects.
The First International Symposium on Roboethics, organized in 2004 at Villa Nobel, Sanremo, Italy, opened an intense debate on the effects of robotics on society. The issues that were presented during the Symposium concerned some general, teleological aspects of a meaningful introduction of robots in our societies and other epistemological elements, whether robotics should be considered a new science or not.
The intense debate over several days was characterized by dreams and hopes, by visions of robots being employed for useful and beneficial tasks. Since then, Roboethics has been understood not only as a tool for risk prevention, but above all as a means to promote the use of robots to help humans. A proactive instrument.
From the active experiences of social robots applications in recent years, even if these lack the necessary continuity to be able to draw acceptable models, we can derive positive conclusions about their usefulness in terms of sustainability and improvement of the quality of life of the beneficiaries and of the operators.
The application sustainability of social robots today requires more complex ELS (Ethical, Legal, and Societal) considerations than those posed by industrial or service robotics precisely because social robots do not exclude humans; on the contrary, they require sophisticated and intensive HRI and dual collaboration.
In this sense, sustainability becomes a measure of the robots' ability to interact in complex situations with humans, their level of intelligence and autonomy, and, if possible, the integration of ELS discriminatory capabilities into their architectures. Similarly, it requires the readiness of our societies to incorporate artificial assistants into our activities.
How capable will we be of accepting alien intelligences whose usefulness has already been proven in many social experiences? Here, the ELS issues will be not only those technical, related to issues of dependability and safety, and societal, as the social problem of job displacement, but also new issues as the level of acceptance, the quality of training of operators, and the ability to utilize the breadth of artificial intelligence of robots without infringing on human rights.
Social robots will be truly sustainable with long-term investments in tackling these ESL issues, especially the adaptation of companion robots to ELS compliance and the training of operators, who will be both professional operators and caregivers from families and schools.