THE ETHICAL CHALLENGES PRESENTED BY ROBOTICS

Abstract

This article presents the state of the art in design and production of robots for military as well as domestic use, highlighting the multiple functions they can perform and the progress they have reached in terms of autonomy in decision making and the growing capability to interact with the human being. If we add to that, the cost reduction to make them and its massiveness thereafter, we would at the threshold of an enormous ethical challenge, no longer a technological one. In this context, the analysis of the ethical problem is focused more from the robot itself, rather than the prospective of the designer engineer. The author focuses to explain the possibility to introduce in these machines some ethical controls, in such a way that make impossible to the robot to break them and damage a human being. With that purpose in mind, some ethical systems as well as its applicability in robotics are explained.