The Inherent Dangers of Unidirectional Emotional Bonds between Humans and Social Robots

The early 21st century is witnessing a rapid advance in social robots. From vacuum cleaning robots (like the Roomba), to entertainment robots (like the Pleo), to robot pets (like KittyCat), to robot dolls (like Baby Alive), to therapy robots (like Paro), and many others, social robots are rapidly finding applications in households and elder care settings. In 2006, the number of service robots world-wide alone outnum-bered industrial robots by a factor of four and this gap is expected to widen to a factor of six by 2010, only fueled by ambitious goals like those of South Korea to put one robot into each household by the year 2013 or by the Japanese expectation that the robot industry will be worth ten times the present value in 2025 (Gates, 2007). From these expectations alone, it should be clear that social robots will soon become an integral part of human societies, very much like computers and the Internet in the last decade. In fact, using computer technology as an analogy, it seems likely that social robotics will follow a similar trajectory: once social robots have been fully embraced by societies, life without them will become inconceivable. As a consequence of this societal penetration, social robots will also enter our personal lives, and that fact alone requires us to reflect on what exactly happens in our interactions with these machines. For social robots are specifically designed for personal interactions that will involve human emotions and feelings: “A sociable robot is able to communicate and interact with us, understand and even relate to us, in a personal way. It is a robot that is socially intelligent in a human-like way.” (Breazeal, 2002) And while social robots can have benefits for humans (e.g., health benefits as demonstrated with Paro (Shibata..., 2005)), it is also possible that they could inflict harm, emotional harm, that is. And exactly herein lies the hitherto underestimated danger: the potential for humans’ emotional dependence on social robots. As we will see shortly, such emotional dependence on social robots is different from other human dependencies on technology (e.g., different both in kind and quality from depending on one’s cell phone, wrist watch, or PDA). To be able to understand the difference and the potential ramifications of building complex social robots that are freely deployed in human societies, we have to understand how social robots are different from other related technologies and how they, as a result, can affect humans at a very basic level.