Recent Advances in Social & Cognitive Robotics and Imminent Ethical Challenges

Abstract

One of the main challenges in developing and applying modern technologies in our societies is the identification and consideration of ethical issues. With the dramatic growth of emerging technologies in today's societies, such as social robots, lifelike computer graphics (avatars), and virtual reality tools and haptic systems, the social complexity of these challenges is on the rise. To be prepared to face these challenges, researchers in engineering sciences and humanities are forming interdisciplinary research groups/activities and try to determine the rate of evolution as well as the effects of socio-cognitive systems on human interaction with intelligent tools and/or artificial agents. A growing number of social robotics researchers are seeking to create a framework to benefit from humanities, philosophy, sociology, and social neuroscience expertise and research. Likewise, growing trends of mutual collaboration among scholars in the field of human sciences, linguistics, and psychology with the robotics scientists are producing quite noticeable valuable results. This paper presents an overview of the novel and multidisciplinary area of socio-cognitive robotics, and further explores the possible ethical challenges of emerging technologies on education, culture, entertainment, gaming, nursing, and therapy. In addition, some key ethical features based on our past and present research experiences in a variety of areas in designing safe social robots are also presented.

Social robots and digital well-being: how to design future artificial agents

“…2, I argued that we should resist Rossi's conclusion for two reasons: first, because if we apply this insight to our designs of social robots, then we have to make unwarranted assumption that the technology powering future ESRs will improve significantly. This is overly ambitious, as several empirical studies suggest (Bughin et al 2017;Bayram & Ince 2018;Meghdari & Minoo 2018;Raj et al 2018). These studies concur that the toughness of technological challenges give us little reason to think that advances in robotics will allow embodiment in convincing humanoid form.…”

“…Samantha, for example, fulfils all of the conditions that Breazeal views as required for being a social robot, without the far-flung technological leaps that an ESR such as Ava would require. On the one hand, while Ava fulfils more criteria for humanness than Samantha precisely because of her embodiment (in fact Theodore suggests that it could be an extra requirement of the Turing Test), this comes at the cost of requiring us to postulate many radical jumps in technological development, even technologies that currently only exist in the most speculative or rudimentary forms (Bayram and Ince 2018;Meghdari and Minoo 2018;Raj et al 2018). On the other, Samantha offers us a vision of the future of social robotics that at current rates of AI development (Bughin et al 2017) 5 are likely to be achieved in the near-term future (within 5 years), rather than in decades.…”

Exploring the Role of Trust and Expectations in CRI Using In-the-Wild Studies

“…It is also important in human-robot and CRI, especially as social robots are becoming more commonplace and are engaging with people in a variety of roles: companion, caregiver, guide, assistant, etc. [80]. Thus, there is an inevitable need to incorporate trust in HRI and CRI.…”

Artificial Intelligence in the Healthcare Sector

“…The human perception of and interaction with robot machines with a higher quality physical appearance, however, still differs from interaction with a computer, cell phone, or other smart devices (Meghdari & Alemi 2018). For robotics technology to be successful in a human-driven environment, robots do not only need to meet a level of strength, robustness, physical skills, and improved cognitive ability based on intelligence but should also fulfil a social impetus and ethical conscientiousness.…”

“…AI thereby helps patients to move, communicate and decode neural activities on an individual basis (Bresnick 2018). Socio-Cognitive Robotics is the interdisciplinary application of robots that are able to teach, learn and reason about how to behave in a complex world (Meghdari & Alemi 2018). The design and construction of social robots faces many challenges, one of the most important is to build robots that can comply with the needs and expectations of the human mind with cognitive capabilities coupled with social warmth (Meghdari & Alemi 2018).…”