“Machinery Rationality” Versus Human Emotions: Issues of Robot Care for the Elderly in Recent Sci-Fi Works

Abstract

In recent years, the phenomenon that robots are used for elderly care in our daily life has drawn attention of the public and the media. It emerges as a new attempt to solve the issue of how to provide for the aged after their retirement. Since 2012, this phenomenon has become the subject of the Sci-Fi movies and TV-play series. In those Sci-Fi works, however, the traditional dystopian human-robot conflicts are partly replaced by the prospect of human-robot co-existence. The robots here launch five ethical challenges: the issues of safety versus privacy, human-robot duality, machinery rationality versus human emotions, affective interaction, and the ethical responsibility for the elderly in the humanrobot interaction. This essay scrutinizes the phenomenon of the elderly-care Robots in three recent Sci-Fi movies/TV series, with a focus on the theme of the machinery rationality versus human emotions. In the human-robot interaction, human emotion, which makes us who we are, has been magnified with the perfectly designed robot rationality as a frame of reference. Thus the discussion of the ethical tension and conflict involved within these two typical groups would be particularly imminent and significant.