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7
automatIon fRom
lovE to waR
Until recently, robots were mainly used in factories for automating
production processes. In the 1970s, the appearance of factory robots
led to much debate on their inuence on employment. e mass
unemployment that was feared did not come to pass. Still, robots have
radically changed the work in countless factories. Driven by a belief
in eciency, factories and labor have been redesigned over the last
century. e rst half of the twentieth century saw a far-reaching
simplication and specialization of the work. is paved the way for
the mechanization and automation of the production process. As a
result, robots have come to play a central role in this ongoing attempt
to rationalize production. In essence, robotization presents a way to
rationalize a certain social practice by reducing its dependence on
people, ultimately by replacing them with machines.
Both rationalization and robotics no longer only concern factory
applications. Currently, no aspect of people’s lives is immune to ratio-
nalization any more. is book has explored the actual and intended
use of robots in various social domains outside the factory. Our study
looked at home robots, care robots, the use of drones in the city, car
robots, and military robots. us, we began close to home and sub-
sequently moved further away from home, ending up on the mili-
tary battleeld. Accordingly, we have talked about the automation of
numerous human activities, such as caring for the sick, driving a car,
making love, and killing people. Robotics in the twenty-rst century
thus literally concerns automation from love to war.
is book is, therefore, about the use of robots in a complex and
unstructured world: our social, everyday environment. It is impor-
tant to realize, however, that before engineers began to rationalize it,
the average factory was a chaotic place too. And nowadays, we even
have fully automated factories that require no human presence atall.
298 Just ordinAry robots
We use these historical insights about industrial robots to reect on
the use of service and social robots outside the factory. One basic
understanding is that the use of robots in messy social practices is
only possible when these practices are organized around their techno-
logical limitations. So before robots can be applied in a certain social
practice, that practice rst has to be adapted to the limited capacities
of robots. In other words, a basic level of rationalization of a certain
social practice is required before robotization, as the next and further
step toward rationalization, can take place.
is nal chapter reects on the societal meaning of the rational-
ization of society through robotization. Our analysis concerns the pros
and cons of robotization as rationalization: both its reasonable and
unreasonable aspects. e use of robots in our society not only oers
numerous possibilities for making human life more pleasant and safe,
but it also raises countless dicult societal and ethical issues. Based on
the ve preceding chapters, we rst discuss the technical possibilities
and future expectations surrounding the use of robots in society. Next,
we review the social gains expected from robotics. en we describe
some social and ethical issues that are raised by the fact that robots
are information technologies, have a lifelike physical or psychologi-
cal appearance, and have a certain degree of autonomy. In addition,
we look at to what extent robotic systems may lead to dehumanizing
systems that may become antihuman or even destructive of human
beings. To conclude, we touch upon a few political– administrative
topics that enter the public agenda through the societal issues.
7.1 Future Expectations and Technical Possibilities
For better or for worse, the future of robotics is strongly connected
to two long-term socio-technological imaginaries. First, there is the
engineering dream of building multipurpose machines that can move
and act autonomously in complex human environments. Related to
this high level of autonomy is the horror scenario of the smart but evil
and destructive machine that has gone out of control. On the bright
side, there is the dream of the friendly robot that exhibits good social
behavior and acts according to high moral standards. e notion that
this will be feasible within a few decades is referred to as the strong
articial intelligence (AI) view.
299AutomAtion From love to wAr
At the start of this book, we introduced three types of concepts to
reect on the state of the art in relation to social and service robots
and the expectations surrounding their future development. To indi-
cate the level of autonomy of a robotic system, we used the terms
“man-in-the-loop,” “man-on-the-loop,” and “man-out-of-the-loop.”
Second, we distinguished three categories of social robots: socially
situated, socially embedded and socially intelligent. ird, four classes
of machine ethics were dened: ethical impact agents, implicit and
explicit ethical agents, and full ethical agents. We will use these con-
cepts to address the following question: To what extent will the strong
AI vision of autonomous, socially intelligent and morally competent
robots become reality in a few decades?
7.1.1 Inuential Strong AI Pipe Dream
In all the ve elds that have been described in this book, socio-
technical imaginaries exist in which autonomously operating robots
play a role. e Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientic
Research (TNO) (2008) expects that as soon as 25years from now,
autonomous cars will be driving around. And the U.S. Air Force
expects that by around 2050, the rst autonomous armed military
airplanes will be in the air. At about that time, some also expect that
there will be human-like robots with social and emotional behavior.
e organizers of the RoboCup believe that a team of robots will beat
the world champions in football by the middle of this century. And
David Levy (2007) expects that by around 2050, the rst marriage
between a human and a robot will take place. Finally, Noel Sharkey
(2008) expects human-like police robots to exist by 2084. However,
these speculations are akin to reading tea leaves.
Yet, this is not about informal guesswork about the future; it is
about expectations that strongly inuence current techno-scientic
agendas and research budgets. Speculations about the future there-
fore have actual political signicance. ey accurately convey what
are seen today as important trends and also as scientic and tech-
nological challenges: more autonomous behavior and the develop-
ment of articial social and moral intelligence. is applies to every
type of robot that we have researched. In Japan, hand in hand with
the media, scientists and engineers are cultivating the image of
300 Just ordinAry robots
multifunctional humanoid robots, which will replace human caretak-
ers in the future (Lau, Van’t Hof, & Van Est, 2009, p. 42). Such ambi-
tious goals turn out to be successful in generating public funding for
fundamental research in the eld of robotics. Especially in the eld
of military robots, the United States sees similar dynamics. e U.S.
Army wants autonomous robot armies by the middle of the twenty-
rst century and invests billions of dollars to reach this goal through
specic subgoals.
e active goal of developing robotics for the domestic environ-
ment, care, the management of trac, police, and the army goes hand
in hand with a new research goal and thus a new societal goal. ere is
an aim for technology to enable an increasing number of autonomous
moral and social actions of robots. us, a radical developmental path
unfolds, namely, the modeling, digitization, and automation of human
behavior, decisions, and actions in new social domains. is is at least
partially legitimated by speculative socio-technical imaginaries, such
as the multifunctional and autonomous machine that inhabits social
intelligence and moral judgment.
7.1.2 Successful and Pragmatic Weak AI Approach
For the short and medium term, developments in the eld of new
robotics are mainly characterized by terms such as “man-in-the-
loop” and “man-on-the-loop.” Robot experts speak of co-robotics.*
First of all, this signies the digitization of various previously low-
technology elds. Robotics makes it possible to utilize machines
in elds that traditionally involve mostly human labor, such as the
sex industry and care for the elderly. Second, in high-technology
practices, such as the automotive industry and the military, we
see a shift from “man-in-the-loop” to “man-on-the-loop” and even
“man-out-of-the-loop.”
Multifunctional household and social care robots belong mostly to
the future. During the last decade, the rst robots that have entered
the household on a relatively small scale are machines specialized in
performing one task: monomaniacal robots such as the vacuum cleaning
robot and the lawnmower robot. In the long term, though, it might
*
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14500/nsf14500.htm.
301AutomAtion From love to wAr
be possible that robots will act as assistant caregivers for patients who
wish to live independently at home for longer. Such care-supporting
robots, however, will not make a large-scale entrance into care in the
short term. e utilization of care robots is strongly linked to the
development of home automation. rough home automation, part of
the work of bedside caregivers can take place from a distance. If this
happens, care of humans will be mediated through a technological
system, and thus, caretakers will be placed in a technological loop.
Although the introduction of home automation is a laborious pro-
cess, the coming 10years will probably see a breakthrough in telecare
around the world.
Another currently relatively low-technology practice in which
robotics can begin playing a role concerns sexual private life, particu-
larly the sex industry. It is not known how sex robots will develop in
the coming years. At the moment, this rather expensive technology is
slowly being introduced in the sex industry. Some see a big future for
sex robots. is is not unthinkable, because in the past, too, sex was
a driver behind the introduction of new technologies, such as video
recorders and the Internet.
Although in health care and the sex industry the “man-in-the-loop”
is now being introduced, the military and cars have known a “man-
in-the-loop” for a long time. Human drivers drive their cars, after
all. In these elds, we see a shift from “man-in-the-loop” to “man-
on-the-loop.” In the automotive industry, there is a trend of moving
from systems that support driving through informing to systems that
also warn and even intervene. e next step in this trend is for driving
tasks to be taken over through cooperative systems (in combination
with trac management). Considering the fast developments in the
eld of robotics, it is now likely that autonomous cars will gradually
become common in the future, around 2030.
Just as with car robots, military robots have a trend that goes
from “in-the-loop” to “on-the-loop” to “out-of-the-loop.” e United
States has invested in surveillance robots for years as well as in robots
for distant roadside bomb cleanups and tele-controlled armed mili-
tary robots. When cleaning up roadside bombs, military personnel
control a cleanup robot from a safe distance. With ghter planes, we
see a fast transition from airplanes manned by pilots to robot systems
(drones) that are controlled remotely by operators. ese operators no
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