Should We Speculate About Robots?

Abstract

The place of social robots in our social institutions is currently an important topic of discussion. An issue that rises regularly concerns the speculative character of several of the arguments in that discussion. This is unsurprising, as many of those arguments refer to future potentialities. For instance, the argument for robot rights has led to heavy debates on the usefulness of this speculative notion. In this contribution, the aim is to reflect on the role of speculative concepts in the field of robot ethics. The goal of this contribution is first of all to examine how robot ethics as a field is engaged in the development of speculative arguments. As a part of this, the speculative components in robotics narratives are reviewed. Furthermore, the contribution zooms in on the discussion around social robots while elaborating on different issues that can be seen as constitutive for improving speculative robot ethics. Finally, the goal is to provide new directions for further engagement with the contingent futures of social robots.