Ethics of robotized public services: The role of robot design and its actions
7 April 2022
Photo: Elsevier Inc.
Prof. Dr. Dominik Vogel, together with colleagues from Austria and the USA, has produced a study on the ethics of robotized public services.
Prof. Dr. Dominik Vogel, together with Prof. Dr. Jurgen Willems (WU Vienna), Dr. Lisa Schmidthuber (WU Vienna), Dr. Falk Ebinger (WU Vienna) and Prof. Dr. Dieter Vanderelst (University of Cincinnati), prepared a study on the "Ethics of Robotized Public Services".
Public administrations are investing heavily in the development of "smart" public services, including autonomous public service robots. Robots are often designed to provide a pleasant interaction with citizens, which can be achieved by making the robot's appearance and actions more similar to humans. This raises the question of whether a human-like design affects the ethical evaluation of a robot's actions.
This was investigated in a laboratory experiment using eye-tracking and a representative online vignette experiment.
The following key findings emerge from this research:
1. A more human-like robot design attracts more visual attention than a robot with a less human-like design.
2. However, the appearance of the robot has no influence on the ethical evaluation of the robot's behavior.
3. In contrast, the results show that it is not the more human-like appearance that influences the ethical evaluation, but that the ethical actions of a robot influence the extent to which it is perceived as human.
Furthermore, the results are placed in the scientific and practical debates about setting ethical rules for (public) service robots.
The article can be accessed here.