The bioethics of coexistence with robots today and in the sci-fi future
The bioethics of coexistence with robots today and in the sci-fi future

Summary/Abstract: We are living in an era when the influence of robotization is continually increasing in all possible spheres of human life. Robots are not only helpful for physical activities; they are even taking on, for example, the position of psychotherapists. This article analyzes the current influence of robots in healthcare and bioethically examines their mutual coexistence with humans – the robot-patient relationship. We find that it is necessary to consider a new ethics of robots, because it is not always clear why artificial intelligence has arrived at a given solution and what exact sequences it has used to do so. Bioethics should also be inspired by the possible scenarios presented to us by sci-fi stories about the potential technical future. When analyzing these narratives, we find that although machines and people coexist, they nevertheless differ from each other, with their own logic, emotions and empathy, their own physics and laws of nature. This machine difference can be a predictable factor of potential dystopias, when machines, based either on their autonomy or the logical consequence of the algorithm, come to violate ethics towards people. Although robots have human-like features, they are not human; therefore, there exists a species boundary between us and them that needs to be controlled.

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