Transcript Robot night cafee - Rafael Capurro: German Homepage

Ethics & Robots
West and East
ラファエル・カプーロ
http://www.capurro.de/home-jp.html
Steinbeis Transfer Institut – Information Ethics (STI-IE)
http://sti-ie.de
Cybernics
University of Tsukuba, Japan
http://www.cybernics.tsukuba.ac.jp/index.html
September 30, 2009
last update: August 13, 2009
IPS Waseda University
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Sony: Aibo
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RoboCup
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Human-Robot Interaction
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"Robots that look human tend to be a
big hit with young children and the
elderly," Hiroshi Kobayashi, Tokyo
University of Science professor and
Saya's developer, said yesterday.
"Children even start crying when they
are scolded."
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Human-Robot Interaction

"Simply turning our grandparents over
to teams of robots abrogates our
society's responsibility to each other,
and encourages a loss of touch with
reality for this already mentally and
physically challenged population,"
Kobayashi said.
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Human-Robot Interaction

Noel Sharkey, robotics expert and
professor at the University of Sheffield,
believes robots can serve as an
educational aid in inspiring interest in
science, but they can't replace
humans.
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Human-Robot Interaction
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-03/12/content_10995694.htm
Kobayashi says Saya is just meant to
help people and warns against getting
hopes up too high for its possibilities.
"The robot has no intelligence. It has
no ability to learn. It has no identity,"
he said. "It is just a tool.„
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HR-Interaction in Japan
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKT27506220080408

TOKYO (Reuters) - Robots could fill
the jobs of 3.5 million people in
grayingJapan by 2025, a thinktank
says, helping to avert worker
shortages as the country's population
shrinks.
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HR-Interaction in Japan

Japan faces a 16 percent slide in the
size of its workforce by 2030 while the
number of elderly will mushroom, the
government estimates, raising worries
about who will do the work in a country
unused to, and unwilling to
contemplate, large-scale immigration.
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HR-Interaction in Japan

The thinktank, the Machine Industry
Memorial Foundation, says robots
could help fill the gaps, ranging from
microsized capsules that detect
lesions to high-tech vacuum cleaners.
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HR-Interaction in Japan

Rather than each robot replacing one
person, the foundation said in a report
that robots could make time for people
to focus on more important things.“
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HR-Interaction in Japan

What kind of „more important things“?
This is an ethical question.
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HR-Interaction in Japan
„Japan could save 2.1 trillion yen ($21
billion) of elderly insurance payments
in 2025 by using robots that monitor
the health of older people, so they
don't have to rely on human nursing
care, the foundation said in its report.
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HR-Interaction in Japan

What are the consequences for relying
on robot nursing? This is an ethical
question.
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HR-Interaction in Japan

Caregivers would save more than an
hour a day if robots helped look after
children, older people and did some
housework, it added. Robotic duties
could include reading books out loud
or helping bathe the elderly.“
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HR-Interaction in Japan

How will children and elderly react to
robots taking „care“ of them? This is an
ethical question.
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HR-Interaction in Japan
"Seniors are pushing back their
retirement until they are 65 years old,
day care centers are being built so that
more women can work during the day,
and there is a move to increase the
quota of foreign laborers. But none of
these can beat the shrinking
workforce," said Takao Kobayashi,
who worked on the study.
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HR-Interaction in Japan
"Robots are important because they
could help in some ways to alleviate
such shortage of the labor force."
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HR-Interaction in Japan

How far will they alleviate such
shortage of the labor force? And with
what consequences? This is an ethical
question.
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HR-Interaction in Japan
Kobayashi said changes was still needed for
robots to make a big impact on the
workforce.
"There's the expensive price tag, the functions
of the robots still need to improve, and then
there are the mindsets of people," he said.
"People need to have the will to use the
robots."
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HR-Interaction in Japan
The „mindsets of people“: This is THE
ethical question!
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Why Ethics of Robots?

Ethics is thinking about human rules of
good/bad behavior:
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Towards each other
Towards non-human living beings
Towards the environment
Towards artificial products
Towards other societies or nations
Towards the gods
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Why Ethics of Robots?

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Robots behave according to rules we
program
We are responsible for their behavior
But as they are „autonomous“ they can
„decide“ what to do or not in a specific
situation
This is the human/robot moral dilemma
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Ethics of Robots: West and East
Rougly speaking:
 Europe: Deontology (Autonomy, Human
Dignity, Privacy, Anthropocentrism):
Scepticism with regard to robots
 USA (and anglo-saxon tradition): Utilitarian
Ethics: will robots make „us“ more happy?
 Eastern Tradition (Buddhism): Robots as
one more partner in the global interaction of
things
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Ethics & Robots: West and East

Morality and Ethics:


Ethics as critical reflection (or
problematization) of morality
Ethics is the science of morals as
robotics is the science of robots
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Ethics & Robots: West and East

Different ontic or concrete historical
moral traditions, for instance


in Japan: Seken (trad. Japanese
morality), Shakai (imported Western
morality) and Ikai (old animistic tradition)
In the „Far West“: Ethics of the Good
(Plato, Aristotle), Christian Ethics,
Utilitarian Ethics, Deontological Ethics
(Kant)
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Ethics & Robots: West and East

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Ontological dimension: Being or (Buddhist)
Nothingness as the space of open
possibilities that allow us to critizise ontic
moralities
Always related to basic moods (like
sadness, happiness, astonishment, …)
through which the uniqueness of the world
and human existence is experienced
(differently in different cultures)
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Asimo‘s evolution
http://www.rob.cs.tu-bs.de/teaching/courses/seminar/Laufen_Mensch_vs_Roboter/
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ありがとうござ
いました。
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