Identifying key ethical debates for autonomous robots in agri-food: a research agenda

Abstract

Agribusinesses are investing in different forms of AI robots, as there is a lot of hope that these machines will help meet the challenges within the agricultural industry, which is to efficiently produce more food for a growing world population. AI robots are expected to enhance production, while compensating for lack of manpower, reducing production costs, taking over unattractive (risky, heavy, and dirty) jobs and reducing the burden of food production on the environment. In spite of these promises, however, AI robots for agri-food also give rise to ethical questions and concerns, which have been little researched and discussed until now. To fill this gap, we developed a research agenda for future research in this area. To do this, we opened our analysis to focus on ethics AI robots generally to specifically identify which of these issues are most relevant to agro-robots. The question we want to find an answer to is: what are the most relevant ethical questions raised about AI robots for robots developed for the agri-food sector? And which questions are not mentioned in the literature, which are particularly relevant for agro-robots? Our paper will provide an overview over the key issues and areas which deserve further elaboration to come to a more mature ethics of AI agro-robots.

Responsible robotics design–A systems approach to developing design guides for robotics in pasture-grazed dairy farming

“…There has been limited work focused on the anticipation of farm system-level implications of robotics and automation in agriculture (Legun and Burch, 2021;Rose et al, 2021b;Ryan et al, 2021). We propose that part of the anticipatory process is to lead innovation through design with a systems-thinking lens (Romera et al, 2020;Eastwood et al, 2022).…”

“…A review by Ingram et al (2022) identified priority research questions in agriculture, including the need to understand factors influencing the uptake of digital technology, how to include farmer perspectives in design of digital tools, and anticipating potential effects of such technologies on agriculture and agricultural work. Ryan et al (2021) note research themes around benefit distribution of robots in agriculture, potential impacts on the idea of the "good farmer", how robots can contribute to positive animal welfare, and the duality of enacting sustainable farming with robots. The interaction between robots and work have been explored in several studies (Legun and Burch, 2021;Nazareno and Schiff, 2021;Rose et al, 2021a).…”

“…In this perspective paper, we consider the concepts of responsible innovation, systems thinking, and co-design to propose a design guide for development of robotics in pasture-grazed dairy farming. The paper builds on recent work interconnecting these domains by McCampbell et al (2021), Eastwood et al (2021), Rose et al (2021a), Ryan et al (2021), and Ditzler and Driessen (2022). Here, we address two questions related to the future use of robotics and automation systems in pasture-grazed dairy systems: 1) What are the key design criteria for development of robotics on pasture-grazed dairy systems to enable successful and responsible innovation?…”

The social and ethical impacts of artificial intelligence in agriculture: mapping the agricultural AI literature

“…The former type of AI involves retrieving an abundance of data from the farm, local climate, data from machinery, and so forth, and integration AI methods (machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning) to forecast and prescribe recommendations for the farmer about when to seed, harvest, and sell their crops; the health and behaviour patterns of their livestock; and image recognition to detect plant disease (to list only a few examples). Whereas, AI robots work (relatively) autonomously on the farm to harvest fruit and vegetables (such as peppers in the SWEEPER project), garden, scrape manure (LELY Robot), weeding robots (the Weed Wacker robot), drones to spray weeds and pesticides (ecorobotix), and robots that hoe and harvest (NAIO technologies' robots), and to measure crop health (agribotix) (examples taken from (Ryan et al 2021). 1 This paper will examine published articles and conference proceedings that focus on societal or ethical impacts of AI in the agri-food sector, through a thematic analysis of the literature.…”

Recommendations for ethical and responsible use of artificial intelligence in digital agriculture

“…Examples of AI-based agricultural tools include machines that are used on farms to hoe and harvest crops, perform weeding, drones to spray weeds and pesticides (Ryan et al, 2021b), and devices used in automatic milking (Shamshiriet et al, 2018). Robots have contributed to reducing the volume of chemicals sprayed on the crops by 80% (Revanth, 2019).…”