Should Care Robots Answer? Rethinking Moral Answerability Beyond Humans

Area of Science:

• Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
• Human-Robot Interaction
• Philosophy of Technology

Background:

• AI systems are increasingly deployed in sensitive areas like healthcare.
• This raises complex questions regarding responsibility and accountability for AI actions.
• Care robots, specifically, present unique challenges in assigning moral responsibility.

Purpose of the Study:

• To define and analyze the concept of 'answerability' for AI systems, particularly care robots.
• To develop a framework for assessing the conditions and normative quality of explanations demanded from AI.
• To explore the extent to which AI systems can be considered answerable, distinct from human accountability.

Main Methods:

• Conceptual analysis of moral responsibility, focusing on answerability.
• Development of a structured analytical framework for answerability, including subjective and objective dimensions.
• Application of the framework to concrete scenarios involving AI-based care robots.

Main Results:

• AI-based care robots can be meaningfully treated as answerable, despite not being moral agents.
• A framework is presented to assess when demands for explanation from robots are appropriate and how to evaluate the explanations.
• Affected individuals may have a right to demand explanations from robots, even with limited responses.

Conclusions:

• Answerability in AI requires both the actor's reasons (subjective) and the quality of the explanation (objective).
• Future AI developments may enhance technical answerability, though full moral responsibility remains a distant concept.
• The study clarifies how to normatively assess explanations from AI systems in social contexts like healthcare.