Social robotics through an anticipatory governance lens

Abstract

Social Robotics is an emerging field, with many applications envisioned. Scientific and technological advancements constantly impact humans on the individual and societal level. Therefore one question increasingly debated is how to anticipate the impact of a given envisioned, emerging or new scientific or technological development and how to govern the emergence of scientific and technological advancements. Anticipatory governance has as a goal to discuss potential issues arising at the ground level of the emergence of a given scientific and technological product. Our study investigated a) the visibility of the anticipatory governance concept within the social robotic discourse and b) the implication of anticipatory governance for the social robotics field through the lens of a social robot design process and key documents from the UNESCO/ICSU 1999 World Conference on Sciences the lens. Our findings suggest that a) anticipatory governance is not a concept established within the social robotics fields so far; b) that social robotics as specific field is not engaged with within the anticipatory governance field and c) that many professional and academic fields are not yet involved in the social robotics discourse as aren’t many non-academic stakeholders. We posit that anticipatory governance can strengthen the social robotics field.