Antonio Carnevale

RoboLaw: Towards a European framework for robotics regulation

Abstract This paper intends to sum up the main findings of the European project RoboLaw. In this paper, the authors claim that the European Union should play a pro-active policy role in the regulation of technologies so as to inform the development of technologies with its values and principles. The paper provides an explication of the rationale for analysing of a limited and heterogeneous number of robotics applications. For these applications, the following issues are addressed: whether robotics deserve a special case of regulation; the direct and indirect role ethics can play in regulating technology; the transformations of both vulnerabilities and capabilities, and the effects of liability law in favouring the socially relevant applications. In conclusion, a reflection on the possibility to generalize some of the RoboLaw findings to other technologies is proposed, with respect to liability and ethics.

Will robots know us better than we know ourselves

Abstract This paper aims to highlight some conceptual aspects on the impact of robotics on our concept of privacy. In those areas where robotics applications will invade the privacy of individuals as computers or mobile phones do today, the current idea of privacy will no longer suffice to ensure the right level of people’s protection. If we think to answer or stop the forthcoming controversies only relying on self-regulation of private parties, we will escape the real challenge: the next generation of robots does not affect solely persons and their individual rights, but the entire structure of society. This article assumes the robotics–privacy relationship as a clear illustration of how the technology–society nexus should be regulated in the future. We need approaches that are contextual–normativeand that should be politically addressed to the creation of a critical culture of technology.

“I Tech Care”: How Healthcare Robotics Can Change the Future of Love, Solidarity, and Responsibility

This paper is a continuation of a previous work where I argued that social expectations driving researches and developments in care robotics are not based on the simplistic optimism in a new commercial artifact but, involve a meaningful transformation of two rational features of human reality – ontology and normativity. In this paper my aim is to take a step forwards by investigating the kind of care relationship that could exist between a robot and a human. Usually, we take care of things and people because we love them, or else we want to give them support in their suffering. However, continuing to only value this sense of care, in a future rendered increasingly transparent and abstract by technology, may mean losing sight of the fact that taking care of others also means taking care of ourselves. If we completely entrust robots with the role of caring, the bigger concern is not the foreseeable decrease in the “humanity” in healthcare contexts, but the much more challenging notion of people surrendering the value and meaning in their lives. Since caring about something means, firstly, giving it value, a society passively nursed by technology is a society unable to give value to things and people. In order to avoid this risk, new approaches are required, no longer based on love or solidarity, but responsibility. I have named this approach “I tech care” and this paper aims to provide a general overview of the main concepts involved.