IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 16

Opinion
incorporate innovations. This includes choosing
whether to design to informal social norms as they
emerge, or merely react to eventual legal requirements.
As we socially construct a new reality, we
will also need to establish relations of trust, responsibility,
and accountability.
Social implications: Small changes in social practices
due to the introduction of robotic applications
can scale up to manifest unintended consequences
within dynamic systems of collective decision
making-markets, politics, and culture. Examples
include displacement of
less-skilled workers by
robots [9] and the changing calculus of conflict due
to drone warfare [10]. Roboticists need to develop
skills in anticipating and litigating the future consequences
of deploying their innovations at scale.
Much of this additional knowledge comes from
the social sciences and humanities, which rely on
different research methods and more contingent
theories than are common in the applied natural
sciences. Methods to characterize human social
behavior may involve legal analysis, ethnographic
observation, survey research, and behavioral experiments,
alongside familiar sensing technologies.
Theorizing often aspires only to be locally grounded
rather than universally applicable, because human
behavior varies so much by context. It is often appropriate
to access such knowledge through teamwork
and multidisciplinary collaboration [11].
it is tEmpting to jump right into the design questions
associated with creating socio-robotic colonies
[12], releasing robots from their social isolation [13],
and equipping them with social intelligence [14].
But if we envision robotics as a public interest technology
that, at least as an aspiration, promotes the
public good, we first ought to acquire more appropriate
knowledge and skills. It should incorporate
the elements discussed here and others that readers
will identify.

Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the NSF
Award: Socially Cognizant Robotics for a Technology
Enhanced Society (SOCRATES) under Grant
2021628 NRT-FW-HTF with advice from Rutgers
University colleagues Kristin Dana, Jacob Feldman,
Jingang Yi, Kostas Bekris, Hal Salzman, Pernille
Hemmer, Matthew Stone, Aaron Mazzeo, and Kathy
Haynie.
16
 References
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[2] D. Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a
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[3] J. L. Holland, Making Vocational Choices: A Theory
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[4] A. Owen-Hill, " 10 essential skills that all good
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[5]
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[7] A. F. Winfield et al., " Machine ethics: The design
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[8] B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction
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[9] D. Acemoglu and P. Restrepo, " Robots and jobs:
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[10] J. D. Rae, " Remote killing and the ethics of drone
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10.1057/9781137381576_4.
[11] J. Trevelyan, The Making of an Expert Engineer.
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[12] A. Agah, " Sociorobotics: The study of robot
colonies from simulation to hardware realization, "
Ph.D. dissertation, Computer Science Dept,
University of Southern California, Los Angeles,
CA, USA, 1994.
[13] K. Dautenhahn, " Trying to imitate-A step towards
releasing robots from social isolation, " in Proc.
From Perception Action (PerAc), Lausanne,
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