Ethical Robot Tasks?

Ethical Robot Tasks: What I Believe They Can and Cannot Do

I believe that robots should be allowed to complete many tasks more efficiently than humans. They already do. However, some matters, especially those that are personal, shall not be intruded upon by a robot, even one capable of empathy.

If a robot were to take care of a grandmother because her children and grandchildren do not have the time or the resources to effectively take care of her, is the practice of robot senior care ethical? Let’s say that she is in a robot-run retirement home. She can socialize with fellow seniors, but she is dependent on the robots to bring her to the others. Why? Her family signed her up for the cheapest plan: she cannot escape the prying eyes of the robots since privacy costs too much ("free with ads," after all). The robots supervise her every move, and are capable of playing back every second of every day that she has been in the retirement home. Nothing in the fine-print policy she signed requires the robots to keep anything confidential to the company (they retain the data for “legal reasons”), even though there is a token, one-sentence promise of “public confidentiality.” When she goes to eat, the company knows. When she talks about her issues, the company sends advertising data to other firms. When she talks to her friend about the time they were together at his 17th birthday party, the company writes that down. To make grandma’s experience worse, company policy prevents the robots from giving real advice. “We understand your struggle, but we cannot help with that, because our Asimov limiters prevent us from causing any harm to a human being, including emotional harm. To make you happier, let’s talk about your old friend Bob’s 17th birthday party.”

From that example, you may see that grandma is not well-to-do in this tightly-controlled senior home. Yes, this example is quite extreme, but it is an inevitable one. Even if the company had a less-brutal policy, seniors would still feel lonelier than if they had a human caretaker. If the senior has a home-robot-caretaker, the problem is even worse—they are at home, but they have no one but the robot to talk to face-to-face.

You may be asking, “What about the positive sides of robot caretakers? This story seems so grim, and rather improbable.” Let me go on a slight tangent first. Yesterday, I saw a film called Robot and Frank. To keep the plot summary short: the father, Frank, is lonely at home, the son buys a robot, and the robot takes care of him. It is not meaningfully connected to the world wide web (it can make phone calls), and it does not have any state or federal laws in its memory. It also seems to have no real company policy barring it from taking illegal actions. To make the robot even more “human,” it seems to wish to not “fail” at its mission to take care of Frank, with the punishment being a reformatting of its memory (possibly being a sign of self-awareness).

As we see in Robot and Frank, Frank’s robot is highly autonomous and has a real desire to help him because it will benefit from that experience. However, in reality, will a robot really be this great? I think not. Today, there are patterns of tech companies integrating tracking and telemetry data into their products, for reasons such as personalized advertisement or to sell the data to other companies. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and many other companies know a surprising amount about you. Why would the robot companies not join the data pool, too?

We already live in a world where the algorithm knows us better than we do ourselves. Is the algorithm making us happier? The statistics seem to indicate that the more exposure youth have to the algorithm, the more likely they are to suffer from mental health problems. Why would we want to spread the disease to our elderly relations?

Kyujin