IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2018 - 31

debate, while the introduction of relatively untested autono-
mous systems into social institutions is often carried out
without a rigorous analysis of the impact of these technolo-
gies on social, cultural, and political settings [5]. The consid-
eration of robotics of the long-term risks for humanity has
played a central role in its development. The term roboethics
[18], introduced at the First International Symposium on
Roboethics in 2004, is a field of applied ethics aimed at devel-
oping tools for the advancement of robotics in the interest of
human society and individuals. Roboethics is the ethics of
the human designers and users of robots, and not the ethics
of robots themselves. From a different perspective, Wallach
and Allen [19] assert that, as robots take on more responsi-
bilities in performing the increasingly complex tasks to
which they are delegated, they must be programmed with
moral decision-making abilities for our own safety, paving
the way for the introduction of artificial moral agents. Ethics
in robotics [2] can be conceptualized in three different ways
that should be considered in the development of the field: the
ethical systems built into robots, the ethics of people who
design and use robots, and the ethics of how people treat
robots. Different fields of applications are considered: from
longstanding concerns of how best to use robots in warfare
and health care to more recent considerations, i.e., the ethical
issues of autonomous vehicles [12].
We contend that robots can be considered experimental
technologies, i.e., technologies characterized by limited opera-
tional experience that is often insufficient when attempts are
made to precisely assess their societal risks and benefits. The
impacts of experimental technologies on society are largely
unknown and, therefore, difficult to predict [9]. As a result,
new technologies can be conceptualized as social experiments
[11], stressing their experimental nature in managing the
inherent uncertainty. Although all fields of robotics can be con-
sidered experimental technologies, this uncertainty primarily
applies to autonomous robots that operate in unstructured
environments. Robot systems that operate in more controlled
settings (e.g., industrial and medical robots) are not character-
ized by the same limits to their operational experience.
Experimental technologies contrast with those approaches
that focus on anticipating the societal consequences of tech-
nological developments to establish moral and regulatory
frameworks. Several efforts have been made to anticipate and
solve potential ethical issues by considering the importance of
ethical and societal impacts on the design of robot systems
(e.g., see [17] and the Ethically Aligned Design document
[20] by the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations
in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems). In some
cases, however, anticipation is not enough to solve the so-
called control dilemma [4]. This dilemma states that, even
though it is not possible to predict the consequences of new
technologies in their earliest phases, once the negative conse-
quences materialize, it is often very difficult to change the
course of development of such technologies.
An alternative approach to anticipating potential ethical
issues is represented by the incrementalism of experimental

technologies [13]. This approach recognizes that unexpected
events can occur, proposes a gradual introduction of the
technology into society to monitor its emerging societal
effects, and iteratively improves its design accordingly.
Robotics, due to its complexity of modeling interactions with
environments and humans, is a technology for which antici-
pation is often difficult. Anticipation, therefore, should be
synergistically coupled with the idea of robotics as an experi-
mental technology in which experiments are concerned with
the introduction of robot systems in real contexts, covering
different degrees of realism: from mockup settings created in
laboratories to real sociotechnical contexts of use.
Explorative Experiments
The experimental nature of some activities conducted within
robot technology can be expressed by the term explorative
experiment [11] as a form of investigation carried out in the
absence of a proper theoretical background. Explorative
experiments represent an epistemological shift from the tradi-
tional notion of controlled experiments, where the conditions
to be investigated are under the control of the experimenters
and the hypothesis to be tested is mostly defined from the
beginning of the experimental process. Explorative experi-
ments are driven by the desire to investigate the realm of pos-
sibilities pertaining to the functioning of a robot and to its
interaction with its environment in the absence of a satisfacto-
ry background theory that could, at least in principle, satisfac-
torily predict the outcome. In this explorative setting, the
control of the experimental factors cannot be fully managed
from the beginning but is, in part, carried out after an artifact
has been inserted into its environment. Explorative experi-
ments possess the following features.
● They are devoted to testing technical artifacts, which are
meant as artificial entities purportedly built by humans to
fulfill a purpose and, therefore, have a technical function.
● They are focused on incrementally refining the interven-
tion, which is meant as the union of knowledge and action
characterizing experimental practice: their ultimate pur-
pose is not to test a general theory, but to probe the possi-
bilities and limits of the intervention.
● They do not force a clear distinction between designers
and experimenters, but, instead, the designers often be-
come experimenters. Note that this commonality of roles
between designers and experimenters is valid in the case of
explorative experiments but does not necessarily extend
to all kinds of experiments performed in robotics. For
instance, it is not observed when service and domestic
robots are used by consumers. In this article, when discuss-
ing explorative experiments, we do not consider situations
in which nontechnical voices are involved in the experi-
mental evaluation.
The advantage of adopting the perspective of experimental
technologies and of explorative experiments, in particular, is
that an interesting ethical framework has been recently devel-
oped for them by van de Poel [16]. In this article, we apply
this ethical framework to the case of robotics and evaluate the
March 2018

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2018

Contents
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