Friendship, Robots, and Social Media by Elder Alexis M

Author:Elder, Alexis M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

8. Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that we should take stakeholders’ concerns seriously, especially worries about the potential for children with ASD to view socially assistive robots as friends. While it is tempting to interpret this concern as a matter of making the children vulnerable to exploitation of trust if malicious parties take control of the machines, or as introducing the risk of grief if the child should lose the “friend”, I argued against these attempts to reduce the concern to extrinsic or contingent harms. Instead, I have made the case that the relationship itself is troubling if taken by the child to be friendship.

The fact that friendship is a valuable human good, however, also gives reason to make use of tools, including robots, which can help patients with ASD to increase their capability of enjoying the good. The fact that deception about friendship seems unethical does not mean that we should discard playful means of helping people to learn and develop relevant skills. Monopoly “money” and other toy currencies provide a helpful model for developing and using these tools are not real friends, and designing them to be zoomorphic or to resemble fictional creatures rather than realistic humanoids, seem like important steps toward this goal.

Doing so will help equip ASD patients to make informed choices about their future social engagements. In effect, they will be at least as well-positioned as the average consumer to decide whether to include robotic companions in their lives, in addition to or in place of human friends. At this point, then, the discussion moves on from paternalistic questions about how to help those ill-positioned to make and sustain their own social connections. We now turn to the ethics of mass market companionate robots.

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