ABSTRACT
The decision to make robots human-like raises representational issues. We see in humanoid robots not mere resemblance of our species, but also a range of characteristics that are ascribed to humans, like gender, race, and age. The human likeness of robots is crucial to eliciting their social categorization (Perugia et al. 2022). Robots could represent individuals and specific groups of people. Giving human-like robots the characteristics of a certain kind could be beneficial from the perspective of usability. Playing with characteristics that resemble specific group members in the design of human-like robots could be used to promote positive interactions with robots and favorable attributes for interactions with them (Zlotowski et al. 2015: 354). Some groups could accept that and even be proud that some robots are similar to them, but this will not always be the case. As the issue of ethics usually focuses on the right and wrong, the focus of this chapter too is on those scenarios that could go wrong and have negative effects. Groups and individuals that are misrepresented or not represented at all could suffer real-life negative consequences from design choices. The negative impact could be those that are not intended at all by the designers; some results are side-effects of choices that aimed to bring positive effects to robots’ functioning. Making the association between robots and social categories is unavoidable to some extent; as Coeckelbergh points out that in the case of social robots, there are always some links to society (Coeckelbergh 2022: 74).
