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Ethics Inf Technol (2012) 14:5360 DOI 10.1007/s10676-011-9279-1
ORIGINAL PAPER
Can we trust robots?
Mark Coeckelbergh
Published online: 3 September 2011 The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract Can we trust robots? Responding to the literature on trust and e-trust, this paper asks if the question of trust is applicable to robots, discusses different approaches to trust, and analyses some preconditions for trust. In the course of the paper a phenomenological-social approach to trust is articulated, which provides a way of thinking about trust that puts less emphasis on individual choice and control than the contractarian-individualist approach. In addition, the argument is made that while robots are neither human nor mere tools, we have sufcient functional, agency-based, appearance-based, social-relational, and existential criteria left to evaluate trust in robots. It is also argued that such evaluations must be sensitive to cultural differences, which impact on how we interpret the criteria and how we think of trust in robots. Finally, it is suggested that when it comes to shaping conditions under which humans can trust robots, ne-tuning human expectations and robotic appearances is advisable.
Keywords Trust Ethics Robots Social relations
Phenomenology Culture
Introduction
To frame the ethical question concerning robotics in terms of trust may easily suggest science-ction scenarios like the story in the lm I, robot in which robots become articially intelligent to such an extent that humans wonder if they can be trustedwhich is usually interpreted as: Will
they rise up against us? But there is a broader and certainly more urgent issue about trust in intelligent autonomous technologies that are already available today or will be available soon. Robotics for entertainment, sex, health care, and military applications are fast developing elds of research, autonomous cars are being developed, remote controlled robots are used in medicine and in the military, and we already heavily rely on semi-robots such as autopilot-airplanes. And of course we (often heavily) rely on computers and other information technology in our daily lives. The more we rely on these technologies, the more urgent becomes the issue of trust. As Taddeo writes in her introduction to a special issue devoted to trust in technology:
As the outsourcing to (informational) artefacts becomes more pervasive, the trust and the...