ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that robots are an interesting subset of the problem of trusting technologies in general. Robots can be designed to exploit the deep pro-social capacities human naturally have to trust other humans. Since robots can move around our shared environment and seem to be autonomous like animals or other human agents, we tend to treat them in similar ways to animals and other humans; we learn to “trust” them. There are numerous potential ethical impacts that come out of our use of these new technologies and these are discussed in the chapter. To ethically trust these technologies, it is important for those building and using robotic systems to thoroughly audit the potential ethical impacts of trusting robots. By adopting a technological essentialist position and by carefully assessing the robots we build and deploy, it is argued here that we may have a better chance of realizing a future with robots that includes an ethically justified level of trust in these technologies.
