On ethical, legal and social issues of care robots

Abstract

According to recent figures, in the next years, Western developed societies will be supposed to face the “aging problem”. The population aged 60 will surpass that of younger people and, to make things even worst, current trends in social relations indicate that family carers are no more willing to look after their older relatives. Such a situation has given more emphasis to the rise of robotics as a possible solution to deal with the demographic change and the new social norms in the care of elderly and disabled people. The ways in which robotics has been proposed to address the “aging problem” are manifold: ranging from humanoids, general purpose robots, to less invasive, distributed and task-specific systems. This chapter intends to provide the reader with an overview of the main ethical, legal and societal challenges concerning the use of care robots.