The Burden of Embodied Autonomy: Some Reflections on the Social and Ethical Implications of Autonomous Robots

As robot technology is progressing quickly and robots are becoming more sophisticated both in terms of their appearance as well as in terms of their capabilities, it is time to reflect on the special role of robots among other artifacts. Specifically, we argue that embodiment and autonomy are distinguishing features that will cause humans to treat robots different from computers or cars. In this paper, we reflect on some of the ethical and social implications of designing embodied autonomous robots and illustrate these reflections with ethical questions that already arise in the context of human-robot interaction experiments conducted in our lab. We conclude that it is imperative to reflect on ethical principles at this time so as to be able to integrate these ethical and social guidelines, in timely and appropriate ways, in the design of future robots.