IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2020 - 52

Asperger Blues
I'm fed up with communicating,
I don't want to talk,
The mere prospect of banter inclines me to walk,
I've tried to understand the
subtleties of the face:
It's hard to learn a foreign language when
all you want is space.
I've been to parties where the music's too loud;
I've participated in small talk, about types
of cloud;
I'll listen to the gossip - who's going with whom,
But I'd rather think about genetics
in the corner of the room.
I like to tell people what I've said and what I've done,
But I tend to lecture - listening to me's not fun.
I overstay my welcome but no one tells me so;
I have no sense of social niceties or
conversational flow.
I'm on the edge of every crowd, always
looking in; In terms of social intercourse
I don't know where to begin,
When people give me looks and think
I'm rather strange,
I wish I had some cast-iron strategies for change.
I'm a loyal type of person, I'll stick to you like glue,
My thinking is absolute - black
and white, false and true,
My face betrays nothing, you'll think I don't care,
Your turmoil and anger will cause me to stare.
And yet I know I do care, there's
emotion deep in me,
Which never gets expressed, or surfaces to see,
Despite my efforts at expression,
my face gives no clues,
I feel down and out with the Asperger blues.

Social Robots
Social robots have yet to get a grip on society. We
don't see them walking down the streets of Los
Angeles accompanying dementia patients, nor populating the care homes of Manchester, U.K. Neither
are they a significant feature in special schools.
Despite the amount of research and investment
that ha s gone into socia l robot s, they rema in
objects of curiosity.
In this article I suggest that the reasons for this are
not technical and practical, but rather philosophical
and ethical.

First I will explore the underlying motivations for pursuing the idea of social robots, and the perception of
the human and the robotic. The question here is why
develop social robots at all?
Second I apply the ACTIVE ethics framework [15] to
establish an ethics for social robots that positions
them not as replacements for human interaction, but
facilitators of human relational interactions in a community context.
As an example I will focus on the use of robots
with children with autism, particularly with reference
to the DREAM project [20] recently featured in this
Magazine. As a result I will critique some aspects of
the DREAM project.

Nature of Robots
A robot is an embodied unit of electronic apparatus
endowed with body parts that can move and interact
with the robot's environment, and that can change that
environment. There is usually some biological imitation,
whether dogs, ants, or spiders [24]. Most of our interest
in robots is directed at machines that imitate the
human body, having arms and legs and most importantly facial characteristics - mouth, nose, eyes, and ears.
The NAO robot, for example, which features in the
DREAM project, exhibits human characteristics. It can
walk, talk, pick things up, and move its head. It
responds to light and sound inputs and is able to process stimuli and alter the environment it operates in.
It is these human characteristics that offer social
potential. Movement and human imitation are important in a social robot. An IBM z13, or an Apple laptop,
while offering artificial intelligence applications, cannot
provide social interaction because of the importance of
the body.
A robot, as an embodied computer, is expected to
be programmable: its behavior is both repeatable and
repetitive. A given environmental input will always elicit
the same response. A robot can repeat the same behavior endless times in exactly the same way. Its behavior
will be logical, mathematically certain, and predictable.
Furthermore, we can train it to behave in a certain
way. We can apply Skinnerian conditioning to it. Whether we implement the robot algorithm as a learning algorithm or using neural networks, our behavioral aim is to
program a fixed stimulus/response pairing.

The Human as Robot
In order to deploy a robot socially we have to assume
or enforce a parallel behaviorist model of human
behavior. If the robot is to act as a human replacement
in a social environment the robot must appear to
behave like a human and the human must behave like
a robot.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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MARCH 2020

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2020

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