Robots as tools for techno regulation

Even machines that do not even remotely look human eg ordinary desktop computers or display complicated behaviours eg relatively simple software programs evoke basic social mechanisms, such as a sense of politeness or of teamwork in users. Robots as Tools for Techno-Regulation What this vast body of research from various disciplines consistently shows, then, is that through their design technological artefacts may influence the behaviours of human beings in a variety of subtle, and implicit, ways.

This is relevant to those interested in techno-regulation. Perhaps, then, the scope of research on techno-regulation so far has been too narrow and ought to be widened, to include both intentional influencing and more tacit forms thereof. Techno-elicitation relates to all forms of evoking human behaviour through technological design. It is a scale of responses in users, running from explicit and conscious ones to implicit, tacit evocations.

Techno-elicitation covers the entire range of behaviours that users may display in response to influences of technological artefacts.

In many cases designers employ implicit user models in the design process. Van Oost30 illustrated this in her research into the values embedded in male and female shavers, which tacitly reflect ideas of gender difference: male shavers are grey and black, contain dials and screws, and can be opened up and taken apart.

Van Oost concludes: [T]he gender script of the [female shaver] inhibits … the ability of women to see themselves as interested in technology and as technologically competent, whereas the gender script of the [male shaver] invites men to see themselves that way. In other words: Philips [the manufacturer] not only produces shavers but also gender. Techno-elicitation, we must conclude, is a spectrum running from intentional and explicit evocation on one end techno- regulation , to implicit, accidental and unintentional elicitation on the other scripts, anthropomorphisation etc , and it holds for both the users and the designers of technological artefacts.

To complicate things further, different technologies all have their own medium-specific characteristics, which means that different technologies lead to different forms of techno-elicitation. In order to shed light on the workings of techno- elicitation we need to investigate its occurrences and effects in different technological domains.

In this article I will attempt to do so by focusing on regulation and robotics. Against this 31 Ibid, Robots as Tools for Techno-Regulation background, legal scholars have also turned to regulatory questions surrounding the advent of increasingly autonomous technologies, robotics and artificially intelligent machines. In fact, they realised early on that the creation of such intelligent, autonomously operating artefacts needed to be evaluated critically from a legal point of view as well.

The earliest articles written in this field date from the beginning of the s—a time when the realisation of artificially intelligent machines was a distinctly more remote possibility than it is today. Since that time, a serious body of literature has been created around the legal issues that may arise in a world inhabited by robots as well as people. In this body of literature, legal scholars have largely focused on three key themes: liability,34 the legal status of robots,35 and rights for robots.

Do robots fall under product liability, and hence should we hold manufacturers responsible for the damage they may cause? Of course, in cases where robots go haywire this seems to be a clear solution. However, things are more complicated than they appear. The idea is to use the same legal principles that pertain to parents and children, or owners and their animals, or employers and employees, and apply these to liability issues surrounding robots.

Moreover, laws on liability vary from country to country, which further complicates the study of liability issues in the domain of robotics. Currently, legal personhood is not reserved to humans only, and hence it is not surprising that several authors raise the question of granting legal status to robots as well. All of these nonhuman entities are treated as separate, autonomous entities by the law, rather than as an aggregate of the people that make up these entities, or as a collection of people behind them.

For centuries all sorts of nonhumans have played a role in Western law, from which we have recently eliminated them. For instance, many animal species have been tried in court throughout history, ranging from donkeys and beetles to rats, grasshoppers, dolphins and eels. More importantly, we also need to consider the fact that a significant number of human beings today have rights that up until very recent times they did not.

Think for instance of women,47 slaves,48 children, foreigners and refugees, or people with disabilities or mental illnesses. These examples show that the category of legal persons is not set in stone. At different times, different entities have been considered legal persons.

A third theme in research on robotics and regulation revolves around the question of legal rights for robots. Deciding whether or not to grant such rights, Solum argues, would depend on both the rights themselves eg, the right to freedom of expression or the right to emancipation and on the justification used for granting that right. This is an argument we should not take seriously at all, says Solum, because the danger seems remote, but if the danger were real it would not be an argument against granting [artificially intelligent machines] legal personhood.

If [these machines] really will pose a danger to humans, the solution is not to create them in the first place. They all focus on the question of how advances in robotics fit within existing regulatory frameworks and bodies of law, and whether changes are required in those frameworks and bodies of law to meet the new social and legal demands created by the advent of robotics.

Alternatively, they focus on questions regarding the need or lack thereof to regulate the development and deployment of robotics technologies. To my knowledge, no research has yet been conducted on techno-regulation and robotics—let alone on techno-elicitation and robotics. Why would it be relevant to study questions of techno-regulation and techno-elicitation in relation to robotics in the first place?

I will answer this question by discussing two domains of application in robotics: healthcare and the military. One area of research and business undergoing rapid development in order to address this problem is that of healthcare robotics. Healthcare robots can also be used for therapeutic ends.

Robots as Tools for Techno-Regulation interaction levels in elderly people, to improve mood, and to reduce stress levels and loneliness. In recent years a number of studies have investigated the ethical aspects of the use of robots in healthcare situations. Yet studying the ethical aspects of applying robots to healthcare situations alone is not enough.

Precisely because of the socially and emotionally complex contexts in which healthcare robots must operate—namely caring for patients in vulnerable situations, we must also elucidate the ways in which the design of healthcare robots, in terms of their physical form and functionality, has a bearing on the behavioural responses they may elicit.

As we have seen in this article, such behavioural responses may be evoked explicitly and intentionally, but also more implicitly and perhaps at times even unintentionally on the part of the designer. Investigating the consequences of explicit regulatory design choices with respect to these machines is important for two reasons.

A significant number of robots are currently participating in the war in Afghanistan, in a variety of roles, ranging from finding explosives to patrolling the skies. Many authors discuss the desirable design and functionality of robot soldiers.

What they implicitly say is that the design of these machines, the code we embed into them, has far-reaching consequences for the behaviours they will generate in the real world. And now, while developments are ongoing and accelerating, is the time to think about these matters. It is at this point in time that we need to think about the values embedded into these machines, about the politics of their code.

In the words of Lessig: Choices among values, choices about regulation, [and] about control … all this is the stuff of politics. Code codifies politics, and yet, oddly, most people speak of code as if it were just a question of engineering. Or as if code is best left to the market. This article focuses on the role of government in relation to cybersecurity. Traditionally, cybersecurity was primarily seen as a technical issue. In recent years, governments have realised that they, too, have a stake in securing the In recent years, governments have realised that they, too, have a stake in securing the Internet.

In this article, we will explain why using techno-regulation has significant downsides and, therefore, why it may be unwise to use it as a dominant regulatory strategy for securing the Internet.

We argue that other regulatory strategies ought to be considered as well, most importantly: trust. The second part of this article explains that trust can be used as an implicit strategy to increase cybersecurity or as an explicit mechanism for the same goal. Esther Keymolen. Traditionally, cybersecurity was primarily seen Bibi van den Berg.

Abort, retry, fail: Scoping techno-regulation and other techno-effects. What is less clear is what the boundaries of techno-regulation are. Techno-elicitation: Regulating behaviour through the design of robots. It is important to It is important to investigate whether technological developments in these fields require adjustments in existing legal frameworks, and whether technological developments themselves need to be regulated.

This paper has two goals. First, I will analyse the concept of techno-regulation and propose that it needs to be broadened. Techno-regulation focuses on the intentional influencing of human behaviour through the implementation of values, norms and rules into technological artefacts. Robots as Tools for Techno-Regulation.

Related Topics. Law and IT. Follow Following. Robots and the Law. Ethics of Robotics. Ethics and robotics. Public Health Ethics. Information Security and Privacy. Health Promotion. Internet regulation. Ads help cover our server costs.