Lieke Marijnissen
The video is in Japanese but it shows very well how this interactive robot works in real life.
Starting the video about pepper (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a4sZnLRvqk)
Pepper is one of the first robots that is able to recognize human emotions and react on them. She is an initiative from Softbank, an Japanese software company. Pepper is one of the examples of household robots. But you can question yourself if this is ethical?
If we talk about ethics referring to robots, it is called roboethics. These ethics can be devided in 3 main concerns:
- The ethical systems built into robots
- The ethics of how people treat robots
- Ethics of people who design, develop and use robots
When you talk about ethics, you also talk about values. To implement the ethics into the design of the robot you can use the value-sensitive design approach. This approach says that moral and social values should work as non-functional requirements for the design of a good technology. In other words this approach takes human values into account. It is a collaboration between engineer, social and human science. For example a care robot.
When a nurse needs to take a urine test a care robot can take a portion of the activity from the nurse. The robot can go to the bathroom to collect the urine from the patient, this takes the privacy, dignity and respect of the patient in account. Afterwards the robot hands over the urine to the nurse who is responsible for sending the urine to the lab. In this example the nurse checks if the robot doesn’t do anything wrong (Tronto, 2010)
We made group based on your discipline (management, design, engineer) so we would like to ask you to discuss the following question with your group in the next couple of minutes:
What is within your discipline the largest discrepancy regarding the ethics and the growing robotics?
Strat discussion > reflect on the discussion