An Ethical Framework for Smart Robots

The Ethical Dimensions of Public Opinion on Smart Robots

“…Hence, we clustered the themes that are conceptually close to each other into groups of themes. Further, following suggestions by Guest and McLellan (2003), themes were clustered by placing the resulted groups under four ethical perspectives, then applying a conceptual ethics framework (Westerlund, 2020). The vertical dendrogram in Figure 2 shows the 11 themes identified in comments as clustered into thematically similar groups.…”

“…Using the definition by Westerlund (2020), smart robots are "autonomous artificial intelligence (AI)-driven systems that can collaborate with humans and are capable to learn from their operating environment, previous experience and human behaviour in humanmachine interaction (HMI) in order to improve their performance and capabilities." That said, it is becoming increasingly difficult to categorize smart robots by their purpose, as new smart robots are now built for multiple purposes (Javahari et al, 2019;Westerlund, 2020). For example, Samsung's "Ballie" is used as a life companion, personal assistant, fitness assistant, robotic pet, and coordinator of a fleet of home robots in a household (Hitti, 2020).…”

“…Opinions about killer robots and sex robots are particularly polarized (Horowitz, 2016;Javaheri et al, 2019). Hence, the current need is obvious for more systematic research on the public perception of smart robots involving ethics (Westerlund, 2020).…”

Promises in the Context of Humanoid Robot Morality

“…I will use Asaro [36] as a starting point, thereby adopting the idea that a legal approach provides a first point of entry to robot ethics. Upon adopting the legal first perspective the following assumptions are plausible: (i) Robots may first of all be con-g Steinert [22] proposes a so-called ethical framework for robotics, which is extended in Westerlund [38].…”

“…I will include robot meta-morality, i.e. the study of robot morality and principles thereof, in robot ethics g[22,38]. With "ethical aspects of robotics" I propose a container for robot morality as well as robot ethics.I hold that Malle supersedes Asaro[39] where robot ethics is still a container of different approaches to "ethics in robotics" (for which I prefer to use ethical aspects of robotics instead) (which encompasses both robot ethics and robot morali-ty as mentioned above).…”