On Responsible and Ethical Robotics

Ever since the inception of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics as a discipline, the aim of researchers has been to make machines as intelligent as possible. In other words, to make machines function as if they had their own mind. Although this presents an exciting prospect for humanity, I believe that we would have to collectively shoulder the moral and ethical responsibilities associated with these efforts. In my opinion, creating machines with minds would be tantamount to giving birth to a whole new species, which we might or might not have full control over.

This exciting (and sometimes haunting) prospect makes Robotics and AI much more than a standalone discipline. It requires a culmination of thoughts, concepts and processes from several other sciences and arts, such as Psychology, Anthropology, Ethics, Law, Production Engineering and several others. This means that future robotics doesn’t just have to ensure good design and high productivity, but it also needs to take into account all the other humane and ethical factors. Some intriguing questions that immediately come to mind are: Should Robots have rights? Should there be a maximum time limit for which they can be put to work? For a sustainable and harmonious future, we would need answers to such questions, and this would require knowledge about not just artificial intelligence, but how it intimately interacts with the other scientific fields mentioned above.