Ethics of Robots According to Posthumanism

This contribution is aimed to present eight steps that I think necessary to go from the current zootechnical society to a zooanthropological one. Let’s have a quick look: 1) The need to redefine our way to interpret “animality” and the need to emancipate it from the historical condition of counter-term related to human. This view change and contaminate the way we look at the other animals, as let us humans be different from the other species. This thought is a premise of every form of estrangement, submission and use of non-human animals. 2) The need to analyze the concept of “animal subjectivity” to get an interpretative model able to explain subjectivity and any kind of its expressions, limited when invoking a conscience or the so-called “superior functions”, as this kind of attitude inevitably lead to a difference among human being and the other species and to set the exclusion bar higher and higher. 3) The need to admit the animal reference, that is to admin the referential, not performative, contribution of the non-human animals in building human predicates; in other words, the need to give more value to the relationship with the other species going beyond the idea that they are useful products but rather dialogical partners that have always been inspiring Homo sapiens, actively living through the anthropopoietic processes. Therefore, we need to think of the non-human animals as co-factorial in building the human dimension. 4) The need to place again in the centre of controversy the concept of moral patient and the redefinition of the relations among human being as moral agent and their own selves interests. I will affirm the need to go out from the humanist-type ethic of symmetry, in which whoever owns some rights must have been assigned also some obligations, to move towards a new ethical prospect that I call empathy. 5) The need to move to a vegan culture, starting from the ecological importance of such a change, to underline how much habitat destruction, agricultural pressure and deplorable exploitation of planet resources will become key topics in the next future. In this sense, vegan choice overcomes Neolithic society; in connection with the vegan choice, nutrition will not depend anymore from animal agriculture. 6) The need to overcome mass consumption and the need to dismiss a solipsistic and individual ontological conception seeking the meaning of external world inside the single individual. This attitude, really attractive to the capitalist machine, lead to a kind of “world-phagy”, with the human being is focus and the rest of the world is gravitating around them. 7) The need to overcome the common anthropocentrism; this does not mean to discard anthropocentrism in its entirety, but to avoid a projective vision of animal, to be able to accept diversity, and to recognise an ontological dignity to the other species. 8) The need to acquire more awareness about what it means to respect those animals that have been affected from a strong relationship with human being, such as factory animals, and to understand how it will change our relations with them. The challenge will be trying to foresee how it will evolve our relationship with those synanthropic animals sharing spaces with us and with which we have so often some conflictual relations; and, besides, how to look at wild animals typically refusing to get in contact with human beings. These eight points are meaningful to me to go from a zootechnical society to a zooanthropological one.

Clearly, technical and scientific progress and moral progress do not necessarily go hand in hand. Therefore, this article encourages reflection on the new ethical challenges posed by such developments and, in particular, by robotics, a field that has developed greatly in recent decades and that has led to possibilities unimaginable until recently. Thus, the author examines here the so-called roboethics, its content, the specific fields it addresses -such as social relations and moral agency of robots-, as well as the different approaches and views on these issues.

2012

1 In this paper the European flagship project proposal Robot Companion for Citizens (RCC), grounded on the idea of developing robot companions for citizens, is taken as a case scenario for investigating the feasibility of ascribing rights and duties to autonomous robots from a legal and philosophical standpoint. In talking about rights and duties with respect to robots endowed with autonomous decision capabilities, one should face the implications that inevitably these terms rise, especially in the field of law. The paper points out the technological problems related to the application of the notion of duty to robots and the problems deriving from attributing a legal subjectivity to nonhuman entities such as robot.

2011

Machine ethics and robot rights are quickly becoming hot topics in artificial intelligence/robotics communities. We will argue that the attempts to allow machines to make ethical decisions or to have rights are misguided. Instead we propose a new science of safety engineering for intelligent artificial agents. In particular we issue a challenge to the scientific community to develop intelligent systems capable of proving that they are in fact safe even under recursive self-improvement.

Machine ethics and robot rights are quickly becoming hot topics in artificial intelligence/robotics communities. We will argue that the attempts to allow machines to make ethical decisions or to have rights are misguided. Instead we propose a new science of safety engineering for intelligent artificial agents. In particular we issue a challenge to the scientific community to develop intelligent systems capable of proving that they are in fact safe even under recursive self-improvement. The last decade has seen a boom of new subfields of computer science concerned with development of ethics in machines. Machine ethics [5, 6, 32, 29, 40], computer ethics [28], robot ethics [37, 38, 27], ethicALife [42], machine morals [44], cyborg ethics [43], computational ethics [36], roboethics [41], robot rights [21], and artificial morals [3] are just some of the proposals meant to address society's concerns with safety of ever more advanced machines [39]. Unfortunately the perceived abundance of research in intelligent machine safety is misleading. The great majority of published papers are purely philosophical in nature and do little more than reiterate the need for machine ethics and argue about which set of moral convictions would be the right ones to implement in our artificial progeny (Kantian [33], Utilitarian [20], Jewish [34], etc.). However, since ethical norms are not universal, a " correct " ethical code could never be selected over others to the satisfaction of humanity as a whole.

This paper reviews the concept of artificial intelligence and its applications. Artificial Intelligence joins the physical world with the computerized world or may be called as machine world. It contains an overview of the logical and conceptual method for creating a stimulated humanoid. It deals with the basic components of AI for the formation of a humanoid, its applications in real life. This paper concludes with the future aspects of the technology.

It is five years since the publication of “Principles of Robotics” developed by a panel of distinguished British robotics and AI experts at an EPSRC/AHRC funded retreat. The principles, which were aimed at “regulating robots in the real world”, were stated in the form of five “rules” and seven “high-level messages.” The five rules are as follows: 1. Robots are multi-use tools. Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans, except in the interests of national security. 2. Humans, not robots, are responsible agents. Robots should be designed; operated as far as is practicable to comply with existing laws & fundamental rights & freedoms, including privacy. 3. Robots are products. They should be designed using processes which assure their safety and security. 4. Robots are manufactured artefacts. They should not be designed in a deceptive way to exploit vulnerable users; instead their machine nature should be transparent. 5. The person with legal responsibility for a robot should be attributed. A 1-day symposium was held on the 4th of April as part of the AISB 2016 Conference in Sheffield, UK. These proceedings contain commentaries on the principles solicited in advance of the meeting. Commentaries were checked for relevance by the organising committee but were not peer reviewed. Revised, extended and peer-reviewed versions of the commentaries together with a report of the meeting will by published in 2017 in the journal Connection Science.

While the concepts of cognitive estrangement and the novum have been grounded in Science Fiction theory for decades and arguably present in its literature for centuries, their depiction and thus their roles in literature have shifted in certain contemporary works due to the popularization of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and theories of Singularity. This trend is particularly evident in Robert J. Sawyer’s “Shed Skin” (2009) and Wake (2009), and Robert Charles Wilson’s “The Cartesian Theatre” (2009) and Spin (2005). A close examination of these works, supported by contemporary technological, sociological, and literary theory, suggests a trend towards the characterization, subjectification, and humanization of technology. This new direction estranges the reader from the traditional concept of the novum and facilitates a new cognition of post-human entities that strive towards a harmonious future of Singularity.

The chapter presents the basic concepts of sociorobots (social robots), viz. terminology, formal definition and categories of sociorobots, intelligence, autonomy, and locomotion issues of anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and wheeled mobile sociorobots.

Abstract. The principle of formal equality, one of the most fundamental and undisputed principles in ethics, states that a difference in treatment or value between two kinds of entities can only be justified on the basis of a relevant and significant difference between the two.