THE ETHICAL FRONTIERS OF ROBOTICSRobots are used in many services such as harvest fruit, pump gasoline, assist doctors and surgeons, dispose of bombs, in factories and industries and even to entertain us. This personal service robot usage in increasing day to day life. But there are two main ethical risks with these service robots: the care of children and elderly, the autonomous robot weapons development by miliatry.so, the researchers in the field of artificial intelligent getting advanced to make human-robot interactions for expression of emotion, language interaction, and speech perception and face recognisation.These service robots are 80% cheaper in 2006 than in 1990’s and it entered to our lives in unprecedented number.
In personal-care robots, Japanese and south Korean companies have developed child-minding robots. These mobility and semiautonomous functions are ideal for visual and auditory monitoring, these robots can be controlled by mobile phonesand PC that allow input from camera and talking from caregivers, research on these in the united states Sony quire and NEC in Japan with PaPeRo have explained the bond between child and the robot and also how many prefer robot to a teddy bear, in a short period of time these build a great bond between them. The television is also a robot, but human attention required for children but, with robot minders they can be without a contact of humans for hours and even several days.
But believing on these child-minder parents should not leave their child for long term since they should receive affections from the parents and also, we cannot expect the consequences if the long-term exposure occurs.At the other side of age spectrum, the elderly aged population is relatively increasing the world. And there are elder-care robots also, which will feed them(my spoon robot), clean them(SANYO electric bathtub robot), work as a remainder for their medicines and messages(Mitsubishi wakamura robot).These robots are helpful for them to lead a independent life but, it is also risk for them without any human contact which can be only given by caregivers. Some robots will act as our pets which will give a relief from contact problems, but they are just toys so, they do not alleviate elder isolation.Another ethical risk is military applications. The caucus of Iraq and Afghanistan have deployed 5000 robots for bomb disposal and some like TALON, SWORD, MAARS are heavily armed for use in combats.
The semiautonomous combat air vehicles, such as MQ1 predators and MQ9 reapers carry missiles and bombs have been involved in many strikes againstInsurgent targets resulting many innocent people died including children. Currently they are not using robots, but they have plans to develop a robot that can locate a target and destroy them without any human intervention. Ground base UAV’s such as DARAP’sare already being created. The military contractor BAE systems have fling trial for the first time with multiple UAVs completing tasks this future combat project is estimated with a budget of $230 billion where robot autonomy is required because one soldier cannot control many robots.
The ethical problem arises because the robot cannot able to identify the combatants and non-combatants, so a clear program is required for that. These complexities got difficult to resolve this problem by many scientist troops. The robots of both care and war are having only two main ethical problems which will get solved in soon from the rabid increase of diversity of scientists and engineers working on robotic applications. Some of these may give advantages and disadvantages for the human beings. International discussion is important to give a policy guide for moral and secure application for people.
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Supported by a fellowship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK
