Abstract
In recent years, the phenomenon that robots are used for elderly care in our daily life has drawn attention of the public and the media. It emerges as a new attempt to solve the issue of how to provide for the aged after their retirement. Since 2012, this phenomenon has become the subject of the Sci-Fi movies and TV-play series. In those Sci-Fi works, however, the traditional dystopian human-robot conflicts are partly replaced by the prospect of human-robot co-existence. The robots here launch five ethical challenges: the issues of safety versus privacy, human-robot duality, machinery rationality versus human emotions, affective interaction, and the ethical responsibility for the elderly in the human-robot interaction. This essay scrutinizes the phenomenon of the elderly-care Robots in three recent Sci-Fi movies/TV series, with a focus on the theme of the machinery rationality versus human emotions. In the human-robot interaction, human emotion, which makes us who we are, has been magnified with the perfectly designed robot rationality as a frame of reference. Thus the discussion of the ethical tension and conflict involved within these two typical groups would be particularly imminent and significant.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Battaglia, F., Weidenfeld, N. (eds.): Roboethics in Film. Pisa University Press, Pisa (2014)
Borenstein, J., Pearson, Y.: Robot caregivers: harbingers of expanded freedom for all? Ethics Inf. Technol. 12(3), 277–288 (2010)
Broadbent, E.: Interactions with robots: the truths we reveal about ourselves. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 68(1), 627–652 (2017)
Freud, S.: The Uncanny. Alix Strachey, tr. (1919). http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf. Accessed 9 Aug 2018
Harari, Y.N.: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. CITIC Press, Beijing (2018). LIN Junhong tr.
Li, X.Y.: Study on the ethical risks of the aged care robots. J. Northeast. Univ. Soc. Sci. 17, 561–566 (2015)
Robinson, H.M., et al.: The psychosocial effects of a companion robot: a randomized controlled trial. J. Am. Med. Dir. Assoc. 14, 661–667 (2013)
Robinson, H.M., et al.: Physiological effects of a companion robot on blood pressure of older people in residential care facility: a pilot study. Australas. J. Ageing 34, 27–32 (2015)
Robinson, H.M., et al.: Group sessions with Paro in a nursing home: structure, observations and interviews. Australas. J. Ageing 35, 106–112 (2016)
Royakkers, L., van Est, R.: A literature review on new robotics: automation from love to war. Int. J. Soc. Robot. 7(5), 549–570 (2015)
Salvini, P., et al.: Roboethics in biorobotics: discussion of case studies. In: Proceedings of the ICRA 2005, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Workshop on Robo-Ethics, Rome, Italy, 10 April 2005
Sharkey, A., Sharkey, N.: Granny and the robots: ethical issues in robot care for the elderly. Ethics Inf. Technol. 14(1), 27–40 (2012)
Sparrow, R., Sparrow, L.: In the hands of machines? The future of aged care. Mind. Mach. 16(2), 141–161 (2006)
Su, N.M., et al.: Mundanely miraculous: the robot in healthcare. In: Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational, pp. 391–400 (2014)
Vandemeulebroucke, T., et al.: The use of care robots in aged care: a systematic review of argument-based ethics literature. Arch. Gerontol. Geriatr. 74, 15–25 (2018)
Veruggio, G., Operto, F.: Roboethics: social and ethical implications of robotics. In: Siciliano, B., Khatib, O. (eds.) Springer Handbook of Robotics, pp. 1499–1524. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30301-5_65
Wendell, W., Allen, C.: Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. Oxford University Press, New York (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cheng, L., He, Y. (2018). “Machinery Rationality” Versus Human Emotions: Issues of Robot Care for the Elderly in Recent Sci-Fi Works. In: Shi, Z., Pennartz, C., Huang, T. (eds) Intelligence Science II. ICIS 2018. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 539. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01313-4_50
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01313-4_50
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01312-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01313-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)
