Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07942 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866911145086943232 |
|---|---|
| author | Berzuk, James M. Corcoran, Lauren McKenzie-Lefurgey, Brannen Szilagyi, Katie Young, James E. |
| author_facet | Berzuk, James M. Corcoran, Lauren McKenzie-Lefurgey, Brannen Szilagyi, Katie Young, James E. |
| contents | Contemporary robots are increasingly mimicking human social behaviours to facilitate interaction, such as smiling to signal approachability, or hesitating before taking an action to allow people time to react. Such techniques can activate a person's entrenched social instincts, triggering emotional responses as though they are interacting with a fellow human, and can prompt them to treat a robot as if it truly possesses the underlying life-like processes it outwardly presents, raising significant ethical questions. We engage these issues through the lens of informed consent: drawing upon prevailing legal principles and ethics, we examine how social robots can influence user behaviour in novel ways, and whether under those circumstances users can be appropriately informed to consent to these heightened interactions. We explore the complex circumstances of human-robot interaction and highlight how it differs from more familiar interaction contexts, and we apply legal principles relating to informed consent to social robots in order to reconceptualize the current ethical debates surrounding the field. From this investigation, we synthesize design goals for robot developers to achieve more ethical and informed human-robot interaction. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_07942 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Knowledge Isn't Power: The Ethics of Social Robots and the Difficulty of Informed Consent Berzuk, James M. Corcoran, Lauren McKenzie-Lefurgey, Brannen Szilagyi, Katie Young, James E. Human-Computer Interaction Robotics Contemporary robots are increasingly mimicking human social behaviours to facilitate interaction, such as smiling to signal approachability, or hesitating before taking an action to allow people time to react. Such techniques can activate a person's entrenched social instincts, triggering emotional responses as though they are interacting with a fellow human, and can prompt them to treat a robot as if it truly possesses the underlying life-like processes it outwardly presents, raising significant ethical questions. We engage these issues through the lens of informed consent: drawing upon prevailing legal principles and ethics, we examine how social robots can influence user behaviour in novel ways, and whether under those circumstances users can be appropriately informed to consent to these heightened interactions. We explore the complex circumstances of human-robot interaction and highlight how it differs from more familiar interaction contexts, and we apply legal principles relating to informed consent to social robots in order to reconceptualize the current ethical debates surrounding the field. From this investigation, we synthesize design goals for robot developers to achieve more ethical and informed human-robot interaction. |
| title | Knowledge Isn't Power: The Ethics of Social Robots and the Difficulty of Informed Consent |
| topic | Human-Computer Interaction Robotics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07942 |