Are Robots to be Created in Our Own Image? Testing the Ethical Equivalence of Robots and Humans

Service robots need to adhere to the ethical expectations of the people with which they interact. Several research groups have developed methods for implementing artificial morality for robots. The hidden assumption underlying this work is that people hold artificial systems to the same ethical standards as humans. In this sense, humans and robots are considered ethically equivalent. However, this assumption remains untested. This paper presents a series of survey-based studies to measure people’s opinions about acceptable and ethical behavior for robots and how this compares to proper and ethical conduct for human caregivers. As such, we assess the assumption that behavior acceptable for humans is also acceptable for robots. In a series of surveys with different samples and methodologies, we find little evidence for rejecting the assumption that people hold artificial systems to the same ethical standards as humans. In the absence of evidence against this widely held assumption, we conclude that ethical norms governing human-robot interaction can be modeled on existing moral norms regulating human-human interaction.