Mark Coeckelbergh

This paper argues that our understanding of many human-robot relations can be enhanced by comparisons with human-animal relations and by a phenomenological approach which highlights the significance of how robots appear to humans. Some potential gains of this approach are explored by discussing the concept of alterity, diversity and change in human-robot relations, Heidegger's claim that animals are 'poor in world', and the issue of robot-animal relations. These philosophical reflections result in a perspective on human-robot relations that may guide robot design and inspire more empirical human-robot relations research that is sensitive to how robots appear to humans in different contexts at different times.

Given the popularity of computer gaming and the educational and ethical problems they raise, we need a way of evaluating games. We should be concerned with particular games but also with games as a medium. We need normative criteria that allow us to judge to what extent the medium and the messages meet educational and ethical standards. This can inform the design, regulation, and practice of computer gaming. This chapter contributes to this task by articulating the epistemic, moral, and ethical aims of education and by applying these criteria to computer games. It is assumed that education aims at the development and flourishing of individuals as human beings who have the potential to grow in wisdom and moral beauty and who cannot reach those goals without others. From this perspective, this chapter identifies the goals of education in terms of knowledge and experience, moral development, and the good life and explores how computer games can contribute to these goals. It is concluded that to the extent that we want games to be educational, we are justified to demand that they promote the wisdom, virtue, independence of thinking, care, pleasure, and - generally and ultimately - the good life of ourselves and of others. Understanding this intimate connection with the good life reveals education as something that is central to what being human is all about.

Usually contemporary technology is understood to belong to secular modernity. But how ‚secular‘ and ‚modern‘ are our technological practices and culture? In this essay I argue that if we want to better understand technology, thinking in terms of a rupture between modernity and pre-modernity is inadequate. I show that Judeo-Christian forms of thinking still pervade modern technological visions and could help us think about what I call the ‚delegated spirituality‘ of the artefact, but that our encounters with particular technological artefacts make possible other kinds of spiritual experiences which we can make sense of by referring to non-modern religion such as animism. I also argue that ‚transfigurations‘ are only possible if we assume the radical instability of meaning. I conclude that all cultures, including ours, can be described as ‚techno-religious‘ forms of life which have a spiritual-material history. The rather exceptional idea of secularization is itself part of such a particular history, and does not exclude breakthroughs of the sacred into technological worlds.

The discourse concerning computer ethics qualifies as a reference discourse for ethics-related IS research. Theories, topics and approaches of computer ethics are reflected in IS. The paper argues that there is currently a broader development in the area of research governance, which is referred to as 'responsible research and innovation'. RRI applied to information and communication technology addresses some of the limitations of computer ethics and points toward a broader approach to the governance of science, technology and innovation. Taking this development into account will help IS increase its relevance and make optimal use of its established strengths. 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This reply to Gunkel and Zwart further reflects on, and responds to, the following main points: the Heideggerian character of my view and the potential link to Kafka, the suggestion that we should become hackers, the interpretation of my approach in terms of the Hegelian Master–Slave dialectic, the lack of an empirical dimension, and the claim that I think that modern heroism entails overcoming vulnerability. I acknowledge Heideggerian influence, reflect on what it could mean to think about living with ICTs as a kind of hacking, comment on the Hegelian interpretation of my approach and its application to human–technology relations, bring novels and films into the discussion, and clarify that contemporary works of fiction are not necessarily entirely modern and that it has been a central claim here and in my book that although modern thinking and practice attempts to overcome vulnerability with the help of technologies, this is not successful, or it is illusory.

Ethical reflections on military robotics can be enriched by a better understanding of the nature and role of these technologies and by putting robotics into context in various ways. Discussing a range of ethical questions, this paper challenges the prevalent assumptions that military robotics is about military technology as a mere means to an end, about single killer machines, and about “military” developments. It recommends that ethics of robotics attend to how military technology changes our aims, concern itself not only with individual robots but also and especially with networks and swarms, and adapt its conceptions of responsibility to the rise of such cloudy and unpredictable systems, which rely on decentralized control and buzz across many spheres of human activity.

A common objection to the use and development of "emotional" robots is that they are deceptive. This intuitive response assumes 1) that these robots intend to deceive, 2) that their emotions are not real, and 3) that they pretend to be a kind of entity they are not. We use these criteria to judge if an entity is deceptive in emotional communication. They can also be regarded as "ideal emotional communication" conditions that saliently operate as presuppositions in our communications with other entities. While the good intention presupposition might be a bias or illusion we really need for sustaining the social life, in the future we may want to dispense with the other conditions in order to facilitate cross-entity communication. What we need instead are not "authentic" but appropriate emotional responses-appropriate to relevant social contexts. Criteria for this cannot be given a priori but must be learned-by humans and by robots. In the future, we may learn to live with "emotional" robots, especially if our values would change. However, contemporary robot designers who want their robots to receive trust from humans had better take into account current concerns about deception and create robots that do not evoke the three-fold deception response.

The safety-critical work in the field of business performance optimization has created the conditions that led to a near-disastrous subsea rupture in 2004 during a slot recovery operation. The successful recovery depended on the imaginative capabilities of the platform crew in trying to decide the courses of action. Statoil lost control of a well on the Snorre A TLP on the Norwegian Continental Shelf but the platform did not ignite. Followed by the safety procedures, oil production was shut down and main power was cut. Several safety regulations were violated and the main power was restored, with the multiple attempts to mix and pump drilling mud before finally destroying the well. The Snorre A incident provides evidence of an imaginative deficit and associated uncoupling of locally optimizing solutions at the corporate level. The result is a gradual deletion of technical system integrity concerns in the negotiation of solutions that restore, improve and optimize business performance.

Philosophy: Technology is composed of fifteen chapters covering such topics as cyber warfare, designing children, video games and virtual reality, nanotechnology, and technology and the environment. The use of film, literature, art, case studies, and other disciplines or situations/events provide illustrations of human experiences which work as gateways to questions philosophers try to address. Chapters are written by eminent scholars, are peer reviewed, and offer bibliographies to encourage further exploration. Photos and line art help illuminate the text. The volume concludes with a glossary and a comprehensive index.

This chapter articulates and discusses several arguments against the lethal use of unmanned aerial vehicles, often called drones. A distinction is made between targeted killing, killing at a distance, and automated killing, which is used to map the arguments against lethal drones. After considering issues concerning thejustification of war, the argument that targeted killing makes it easier to start a war, and the argument that killing at a distance is problematic, this chapter focuses on two arguments against automated killing, which are relevant to all kinds of “machine killing”. The first argument questions ifmachines can ever be moral agents and is based on differences in capacities for moral decision-making between humans and machines. The second argument, which has received far less attention in the literature on machine ethics and ethics of drones, focuses on the question if machines canever be “moral patients”. It is argued that there is a morally significant qualitative difference in vulnerability and way of being between drones and humans, and that because of this asymmetry fully automated killing without or with little human involvement is not justified.

Is it justified at all that a machine kills people, or takes decisions about life and death? Philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh argues in his guest article for uni:view why the use of fully autonomous weapons is ethically highly problematic.Weapon systems become more and more autonomous. This means that they can take decisions without human intervention. Sometimes human operators can still override the decision or are still "in the loop": they are still involved in the decision. But as the technology advances, we get systems that in principle do not need the human. Do we want this? Do we want to allow this?

Contemporary philosophy of technology, in particular mediation theory, has largely neglected language and has paid little attention to the social-linguistic environment in which technologies are used. In order to reintroduce and strengthen these two missing aspects we turn towards Ricoeur’s narrative theory. We argue that technologies have a narrative capacity: not only do humans make sense of technologies by means of narratives but technologies themselves co-constitute narratives and our understanding of these narratives by configuring characters and events in a meaningful temporal whole. We propose a hermeneutic framework that enables us to categorise and interpret technologies according to two hermeneutic distinctions. Firstly, we consider the extent to which technologies close in on the paradigm of the written text by assessing their capacity to actively configure characters and events into a meaningful whole; thereby introducing a linguistic aspect in the theory of technological mediation. Secondly, we consider the extent to which technologieshave the capacity to abstract from the public narrative time of actual characters and events by constructing quasi-characters and quasi-events, thereby introducing the social in our conception of technological mediation. This leads us to the outlines of a theory of narrative technologies that revolves around four hermeneutic categories. In order to show the merits of this theory, we discuss the categories by analysing paradigmatic examples of narrative technologies: the bridge, the hydroelectric power plant, video games, and electronic money.

The development of social robots for children with autism has been a growth field for the past 15 years. This article reviews studies in robots and autism as a neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts socialcommunication development, and the ways social robots could help children with autism develop social skills. Drawing on ethics research from the EU-funded Development of Robot-Enhanced Therapy for Children with Autism project, this paper explores how ethics evolves and developed in this European project.

Human-Autonomous Systems Cooperation raises several ethical and philosophical issues that need to be addressed not only at the stage of implementation of the system but also preferably at the stage of development. This paper identifies and discusses some of these issues, with a specific focus on human-machine cooperation problems and chances, focusing usage of these systems in military contexts. It is argued that ethical, philosophical, and technical problems include data security and monitoring/management, agency, distancing and speed/time, and cooperation, networks and knowledge. These issues need to be taken into account not only in the application but also in processes of research and development and legal regulation.

How can we best theorize technology and the good society? This essay responds to this issue by showing how our assumptions about the meaning of the social and the political influence our evaluations of the impact of new technologies on society, and how, conversely, new technologies also shape the concepts we use to evaluate them. In the course of the analysis, the essay offers a polemic that questions individualist approaches to the good society and individualist assumptions about the social, especially in the analytic-individualist traditions and in postphenomenology, and recommends that more philosophers of technology use the resources of political philosophy to tackle the challenge of understanding and evaluating technology and society.

What do we mean by good healthcare, and do machines threaten it? If good care requires expertise, then what kind of expertise is this? If good care is “human” care, does this necessarily mean “non-technological” care? If not, then what should be the precise role of machines in medicine and healthcare? This chapter argues that good care relies on expert know-how and skills that enable care givers to care-fully engage with patients. Evaluating the introduction of new technologies such as robots or expert systems then requires us to ask how the technologies impact on the “know-how” expertise of care givers, and whether they encourage a less care-full way of doing things. What role should which technologies play in which tasks and practices? Can we design and use them in such a way that they promote care-full and engaged ways of doing things with people? It is concluded that new machines require new skills to handle the technology but also and especially new knowing-how to handle people: knowing how to be care-full and caring with the technology. Good care is not about something external called “ethics” but about how things are done in medical and care practices. Machines are welcome if they contribute to this more knowledgeable, skillful, participatory, engaged, and caring way of doing things. This vision of good care enables us to evaluate new technologies and encourages care givers, care receivers, and other stakeholders to explore better ways of designing, regulating, and using them.