Socially Assistive Robots for Storytelling and Other Activities to Support Aging in Place

Miller, Jordan; McDaniel, Troy

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-70716-3_6

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 52 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Near-future SAs of the sort that we consider in this paper would likely raise the full range of ethical issues that have already been discussed in the context of current SAs, assistive technologies [4], smart homes [5], IoT [6], and ubiquitous monitoring [7], [8], network security and surveillance [6], [7], [9], and multi-modal sensing including inputs from wearable and other devices [4][10] [11]. There is also a growing literature that surveys the broad range of ethical issues that have emerged in relation to AI, including reports by IEEE [12] and various governmental and non-governmental entities [13], [14], [15], [16], [17] .…”

Section: The Ethical Landscape Around Smart Assistantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethical Issues in Near-Future Socially Supportive Smart Assistants for Older Adults

London

Razin

Borenstein

et al. 2023

IEEE Trans. Technol. Soc.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper considers novel ethical issues pertaining to near-future artificial intelligence (AI) systems that seek to support, maintain, or enhance the capabilities of older adults as they age and experience cognitive decline. In particular, we focus on smart assistants (SAs) that would seek to provide proactive assistance and mediate social interactions between users and other members of their social or support networks. Such systems would potentially have significant utility for users and their caregivers if they could reduce the cognitive load for tasks that help older adults maintain their autonomy and independence.However, proactively supporting even simple tasks, such as providing the user with a summary of a meeting or a conversation, would require a future SA to engage with ethical aspects of human interactions which computational systems currently have difficulty identifying, tracking, and navigating. If SAs fail to perceive ethically relevant aspects of social interactions, the resulting deficit in moral discernment would threaten important aspects of user autonomy and well-being. After describing the dynamic that generates these ethical challenges, we note how simple strategies for prompting user oversight of such systems might also undermine their utility. We conclude by considering how near-future SAs could exacerbate current worries about privacy, commodification of users, trust calibration and injustice.

show abstract