Responsible Innovation 'Bottom Up'? Using Mobile Robots as a Case

Robotics and AI technologies often have been perceived as radically innovative technologies that likely will cause problematic disruptions of society. In particular, ethical concerns about the simulation of high-level human capacities in social robots have engendered calls for various forms of 'top-down' regulation, guided by pre-set values and standards. Working from insights of a case study with mobile robots, we suggest in this discussion paper that we might do better in pursuing responsible innovation bottom-up: Moving among robots with minimal social interaction skills, citizens may practically acquire the technological knowledge that can protect them against anthropomorphizing overinterpretations and inappropriate attachments. We unfold this suggestion in three steps: First, reporting on our case study, we describe the limited role of value considerations among the design goals that currently guide developers and early adopters of mobile robots in the retail industry. Second, based on an observation from an ethnographic pilot study and related HRI research on mobile robots, we derive a proposal for responsible innovation bottom-up, as supervised social experiment and cultural learning. Third, we discuss the proposal, pro and contra.