Abstract
Responsible Robotics is about developing robots in ways that take their social implications into account, which includes conceptually framing robots and their role in the world accurately. We are now in the process of incorporating robots into our world and we are trying to figure out what to make of them and where to put them in our conceptual, physical, economic, legal, emotional and moral world. How humans think about robots, especially humanoid social robots, which elicit complex and sometimes disconcerting reactions, is not predetermined. The animal–robot analogy is one of the most commonly used in attempting to frame interactions between humans and robots and it also tends to push in the direction of blurring the distinction between humans and machines. We argue that, despite some shared characteristics, when it comes to thinking about the moral status of humanoid robots, legal liability, and the impact of treatment of humanoid robots on how humans treat one another, analogies with animals are misleading.
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Notes
Many roboticists talk about robots “feeling” or “sensing” the environment because these machines are endowed with sensors, but their discourse is metaphorical.
Some scholars, like Solaiman, turn to animals as a model to deny that robots should be granted personhood (Solaiman 2017). The scholar uses a case in which a judge denied personhood to chimpanzees to argue against the idea of conferring legal personhood to robots. This all-or-nothing approach on personhood (either animals and robots have all the rights and duties connected with personhood or they don’t have any) may be too coarse-grained for our analysis, since it begs the question on why there are laws against animal cruelty even though animals are not considered persons.
Strict liability means liability does not depend on intent to do harm or negligence. With strict liability, one is liable regardless of the fact that one had no ill intent and may have taken precautions to prevent the harm. By contrast, negligence involves failure to take proper care in doing something.
In a later paper, Kelley et al. (2010) further modify the Robots as Animals framework by specifying that the important distinction is between robots that are dangerous and robots that are safe. Using an analogy with dangerous dogs, they suggest that bans or restrictions might be appropriate for dangerous robots.
Currently there are a number of codes or standards for robotics such as the EPSRC Principles of Robotics that have a thrust in this direction but are not specific. For example, the 4th rule in EPSRC’s Principles for Designers, Builders, and Users of Robots is that: “Robots are manufactured artefacts. They should not be designed in a deceptive way to exploit vulnerable users; instead their machine nature should be transparent.” (EPSRC 2010).
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