Liat Lavi

Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Israel

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Robots Anthropomorphism - Design Meets Ethics and Law

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The tendency to anthropomorphize (some) robots is an undeniable fact. We tend to ascribe mental states, agency and even emotions and desires to robots based on their appearances, actions, movement patterns and communication capacities (Boden 2006; Darling 2016). While in academia and industry progress is continually made to enhance this phenomenon in designing human-robot interaction (including, but not limited to, overcoming the ‘uncanny valley’. Mori, 1970; Bing and Michael 2018), policy makers (IEEE 2018; EPSRC 2010) suggest robot anthropomorphism is a serious worry and call for advancing ‘robot transparency’. This paper asks what it is that is worrying about robot anthropomorphism, examines the historical and conceptual relations between AI and deception, originating in Turing 1950, and suggest that an ethically aligned program for robot design should address these worries. The paper further looks at the relevant legal frameworks, and asks whether social robots design could or should be considered a form of fraud or deception.

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Liat Lavi is a lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, post-doc researcher at Bar Ilan University. Her current research examines the intersections between philosophy of mind, art, and technology. Her paper "Stretching Personhood beyond Humans: What recent discussions on Animal Rights can Teach us on the Ethical Treatment of Robots", is forthcoming in Automata's Inner Movie: Science and Philosophy of Mind, eds. Curado, M. and Gouveia, S. (Vernon Press).