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The human relationship in the ethics of robotics: a call to Martin Buber’s I and Thou

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Abstract

Artificially Intelligent robotic technologies increasingly reflect a language of interaction and relationship and this vocabulary is part and parcel of the meanings now attached to machines. No longer are they inert, but interconnected, responsive and engaging. As machines become more sophisticated, they are predicted to be a “direct object” of an interaction for a human, but what kinds of human would that give rise to? Before robots, animals played the role of the relational other, what can stories of feral children tell us about what it means to be human? What of ‘relationship’ do AI and robotic scientists draw on to generate ideas about their relational others? I will address these questions by reference to the work of Martin Buber in I and Thou.

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Notes

  1. Buber wrote at a time when it was convention to use the gendered term ‘man’ to stand in for men and women. Feminist authors have challenged this view that the use of man was neutral, but instead reflected power relations which put man at the top of the hierarchy (Romaine 1998). Therefore, when citing original source material such as Buber I use the exact phrasing that Buber used, but in representing his views today I use gender neutral human understood as a cultural and biological being. In anthropological narratives, the term ‘person’ is preferred over human, as a person is the expression of a being in a cultural matrix of relations with others, recognized as a legal, economic, social, and political entity and part of a kinship network with identifying characteristics of personhood as mother, father, sister, or brother etc., (Strathern 1988). In the interdisciplinary field of robotics, the term human is used more extensively, except when a particular group is identified as a research cohort (for example, children with autism, adults with Alzheimer’s, elderly adults etc.,).

  2. Cyberneticist Kevin Warwick has taken parts of machines and inserted them into his body, a practice increasingly commonplace in robotic prosthetics. The mechanical prosthetic is more than just added, it is integrated into a network of nerves into the body, which allow muscle signals to activate the prosthetic. This practice has led to a reassessment of what it means to be human if parts of the machine are integrated into the body (Warwick 2004).

  3. It is reported this was a story fabricated by the missionary to receive funds and suspicions were aroused because of racial arguments against ‘native evidence’ amidst the flourishing of Indian Independence (Newton 2002, p.g 192–193) .

  4. It might be helpful to ask how male roboticists who themselves have not taken on significant areas of responsibility for caring for their loved ones on a fulltime or semi permanent basis can now become responsible for developing a new species of relational robot?

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Senior Research Fellow Ethics of Robotics, Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility, De Montfort University, Leicester, LE1 9BH, UK

    Kathleen Richardson

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  1. Kathleen Richardson
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Correspondence to Kathleen Richardson.

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Richardson, K. The human relationship in the ethics of robotics: a call to Martin Buber’s I and Thou. AI & Soc 34, 75–82 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0699-2

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