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The autonomy-safety-paradox of service robotics in Europe and Japan: a comparative analysis

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Abstract

Service and personal care robots are starting to cross the threshold into the wilderness of everyday life, where they are supposed to interact with inexperienced lay users in a changing environment. In order to function as intended, robots must become independent entities that monitor themselves and improve their own behaviours based on learning outcomes in practice. This poses a great challenge to robotics, which we are calling the “autonomy-safety-paradox” (ASP). The integration of robot applications into society requires the reconciliation of two conflicting aspects: increasing machine autonomy and ensuring safety in end-use. As the level of robot autonomy grows, the risk of accidents will increase, and it will become more and more difficult to identify who is responsible for any damage incurred. However, emphasizing safety impairs the autonomous functioning of the robot. This problem implies the need for a broadened concept of product safety. Our comparative study shows that the institutional framing of the ASP as well as concrete solutions to this problem differs between Europe and Japan in two respects: (1) the understanding of robot agency and (2) the concept of “appropriate” user–robot interaction.

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Notes

  1. For an in-depth discussion of self-responsibility concepts, see Henkel and Åkerstrøm Andersen 2015.

  2. This discussion seems to have little resonance among Japanese scholars (see, for a few exceptions, Nakada (2010); Akasaka (2014)).

  3. For example, the research agenda of the European Robotics Platform (2009) states that alongside the developing industry, “[e]xisting national laws and international conventions, as well as different ethical and cultural perspectives and societal expectations across the different states of Europe need to be taken into consideration” (p. 8).

  4. Robot Companions for Citizens, http://www.robotcompanions.eu/ (accessed 29 Dec 2014).

  5. RoboLaw: Project Overview, http://www.robolaw.eu/projectdetails.htm (accessed 19 Dec 2014).

  6. Even the term “robot” can have different meanings for different academics or experts; there is as yet no general agreement on its definition (euRobotics 2012, p. 15).

  7. According to this view, it would be absurd to categorize a robotic system as a perpetrator to be punished (euRobotics 2012, p. 51).

  8. The project was funded by the European Commission within the Seventh Framework Programme of the Information and Communication Technology (2010–2012).

  9. RoboLaw: Project Overview, http://www.robolaw.eu/projectdetails.htm (accessed 19 Dec 2014).

  10. The possibility of attributing legal personality to contracting software programmes (under a civil law framework) has been discussed for many years (e.g. Solum 1992; Karnow 1994; Allen and Widdison 1996; Andrade et al. 2007). In the countries featured in these studies, there are no special regulations that would explicitly grant legal or contractual capacity to a software programme. To recognize the legal personhood of computational entities requires either expanding the current legal framework or creating a completely new one. For this reason, the discussions mainly focus on the question of how the existing legal institutions, e.g. the rules concerning “messengers”, “minors” or “representatives” (in terms of agency law), could be analogously applied to software programmes in electronic transactions. The conclusion is that electronic entities could have, if any, only a minimal status under existing legal norms; responsibility and liability fall back after all on natural persons or corporate bodies.

  11. According to the “Annual Report on the Aging Society” released by the Cabinet Office of the Japanese government in 2013, Japan is the world’s fastest ageing society (p. 7). In the year 2012, the number of people aged 65 and over reached 24.1 % of the total population (pp. 2–3).

  12. According to some researchers (Matsuhira and Ogawa 2009; Japan Economic Research Institute 2011; Wagner 2013), the 2005 Aichi Expo, when the state-of-the-art products of Japanese robotics caught public attention at home and abroad, was a major turning point for Japan’s robot policy.

  13. The official conception of absent end-users has been recently questioned by foreign observers (Matsuzaki 2010; Wagner 2009, 2013). Critical reflections on this subject can also be found in some early analyses by Japanese authors (Sena 2004; Ishii 2006).

  14. See, for example, http://www.orixliving.jp/company/pdf/pressinfo_141104.pdf (in Japanese, accessed 6 Jan 2015).

  15. See http://www.nedo.go.jp/news/press/AA5_0095A.html (in Japanese, accessed 17 Nov 2014).

  16. See http://www.bengo4.com/topics/2352/ (in Japanese, accessed 11 Dec 2014).

  17. See the overview of the project, http://www.nedo.go.jp/content/100147025.pdf (in Japanese, accessed 16 Sept 2014).

  18. See http://www.nedo.go.jp/activities/EP_00270.html (in Japanese, accessed 16 Sept 2014).

  19. See, for example, “Who is responsible for the safety of robot use?”, Mynavi News, 20 Aug 2014, http://news.mynavi.jp/series/service_robot/006/ (in Japanese, accessed 16 Sept 2014).

  20. The author adopts a cautious stance towards the idea of assigning legal responsibility to robots, describing it as a science-fiction-type thought experiment (p. 104).

  21. Personal interview, 29 August 2011.

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Acknowledgments

The paper presented here draws on findings of the research project “Development of Humanoid and Service Robots: An International Comparative Research Project—Europe and Japan”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). We are grateful to the DFG for their support. We also would like to thank the two reviewers for their instructive comments which helped us to enhance our paper.

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    Hironori Matsuzaki & Gesa Lindemann

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Matsuzaki, H., Lindemann, G. The autonomy-safety-paradox of service robotics in Europe and Japan: a comparative analysis. AI & Soc 31, 501–517 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-015-0630-7

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