Purpose of Review
To summarize the set of roboethics issues that uniquely arise due to the corporeality and physical interaction modalities afforded by robots, irrespective of the degree of artificial intelligence present in the system.
Recent Findings
One of the recent trends in the discussion of ethics of emerging technologies has been the treatment of roboethics issues as those of “embodied AI,” a subset of AI ethics. In contrast to AI, however, robots leverage human’s natural tendency to be influenced by our physical environment. Recent work in human-robot interaction highlights the impact a robot’s presence, capacity to touch, and move in our physical environment has on people, and helping to articulate the ethical issues particular to the design of interactive robotic systems.
Summary
The corporeality of interactive robots poses unique sets of ethical challenges. These issues should be considered in the design irrespective of and in addition to the ethics of artificial intelligence implemented in them.