The Ethics Blog

A blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)

Month: October 2020

“Cooperative,” “pleasant” and “reliable” robot colleague is wanted

smiling robot making eye contact
26 October, 2020 / / 1 Comment

Robots are getting more and more functions in our workplaces. Logistics robots pick up the goods in the warehouse. Military robots disarm the bombs. Caring robots lift patients and surgical robots perform the operations. All this in interaction with human staff, who seem to have got brave new robot colleagues in their workplaces.

Given that some people treat robots as good colleagues and that good colleagues contribute to a good working environment, it becomes reasonable to ask: Can a robot be a good colleague? The question is investigated by Sven Nyholm and Jilles Smids in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics.

The authors approach the question conceptually. First, they propose criteria for what a good colleague is. Then they ask if robots can live up to the requirements. The question of whether a robot can be a good colleague is interesting, because it turns out to be more realistic than we first think. We do not demand as much from a colleague as from a friend or a life partner, the authors argue. Many of our demands on good colleagues have to do with their external behavior in specific situations in the workplace, rather than with how they think, feel and are as human beings in different situations of life. Sometimes, a good colleague is simply someone who gets the job done!

What criteria are mentioned in the article? Here I reproduce, in my own words, the authors’ list, which they do not intend to be exhaustive. A good colleague works well together to achieve goals. A good colleague can chat and help keep work pleasant. A good colleague does not bully but treats others respectfully. A good colleague provides support as needed. A good colleague learns and develops with others. A good colleague is consistently at work and is reliable. A good colleague adapts to how others are doing and shares work-related values. A good colleague may also do some socializing.

The authors argue that many robots already live up to several of these ideas about what a good colleague is, and that the robots in our workplaces will be even better colleagues in the future. The requirements are, as I said, lower than we first think, because they are not so much about the colleague’s inner human life, but more about reliably displayed behaviors in specific work situations. It is not difficult to imagine the criteria transformed into specifications for the robot developers. Much like in a job advertisement, which lists behaviors that the applicant should be able to exhibit.

The manager of a grocery store in this city advertised for staff. The ad contained strange quotation marks, which revealed how the manager demanded the facade of a human being rather than the interior. This is normal: to be a professional is to be able to play a role. The business concept of the grocery store was, “we care.” This idea would be a positive “experience” for customers in the meeting with the staff. A greeting, a nod, a smile, a generally pleasant welcome, would give this “experience” that we “care about people.” Therefore, the manager advertised for someone who, in quotation marks, “likes people.”

If staff can be recruited in this way, why should we not want “cooperative,” “pleasant” and “reliable” robot colleagues in the same spirit? I am convinced that similar requirements already occur as specifications when robots are designed for different functions in our workplaces.

Life is not always deep and heartfelt, as the robotization of working life reflects. The question is what happens when human surfaces become so common that we forget the quotation marks around the mechanically functioning facades. Not everyone is as clear on that point as the “humanitarian” store manager was.

Pär Segerdahl

Written by…

Pär Segerdahl, Associate Professor at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics and editor of the Ethics Blog.

Nyholm, S., Smids, J. Can a Robot Be a Good Colleague?. Sci Eng Ethics 26, 2169–2188 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-019-00172-6

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Approaching future issues

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Global sharing of genomic data requires perspicuous research communication

crowd
14 October, 2020 / / 1 Comment

To understand how our genes affect health and disease, drug reactions, and much more, researchers need to share vast amounts of data from people in different parts of the world. This makes genomic research dependent on public trust and support.

Do people in general trust research? Are we willing to donate DNA and health information to researchers? Are we prepared to let researchers share the information with other researchers, perhaps in other parts of the world? Even with researchers at for-profit companies? These and other issues were recently examined in the largest study to date about the public’s attitudes to participating in research and sharing genetic information. The questionnaire was translated into 15 languages ​​and answered by 36,268 people in 22 countries.

The majority of respondents are unwilling or unsure about donating DNA and health information to research. In general, the respondents are most willing to donate to research physicians, and least willing to donate to for-profit researchers. Less than half of the respondents say they trust data sharing between several users. The study also reveals differences between countries. In Germany, Poland, Russia and Egypt, for example, trust in data sharing between several users is significantly lower than in China, India, the United Kingdom and Pakistan.

The study contains many more results that are interesting. For example, people who claim to be familiar with genetics are more willing to donate DNA and health data. Especially those with personal experience of genetics, for example, as patients or as members of families with hereditary disease, or through one’s profession. However, a clear majority say they are unfamiliar with the concepts of DNA, genetics and genomics. You can read all the results in the article, which was recently published in The American Journal of Human Genetics.

What practical conclusions can we draw from the study? The authors of the article emphasize the importance of increasing the public’s familiarity with genomic research. Researchers need to build trust in data collection and sharing. They need to participate in dialogues that make it clear why they share large amounts of data globally. Why is it so important? It also needs to become more understandable why not only physicians can carry out the research. Why are collaborations with for-profit companies needed? Moreover, what significance can genetic techniques have for future patients?

Well-functioning genomic research thus needs well-functioning research communication. What then is good research communication? According to the article, it is not about pedagogically illustrating the molecular structure of DNA. Rather, it is about understanding the conditions and significance of genomic research for healthcare, patients, and society, as well as the role of industry in research and development.

Personally, I want to put it this way. Good research communication helps us see things more perspicuously. We need continuous overviews of interrelated parts of our own societies. We need to see our roles and relationships with each other in complex societies with different but intertwined activities, such as research, healthcare, industry, and much more. The need for perspicuous overviews also applies to the experts, whose specialties easily create one-sidedness.

In this context, let me cautiously warn against the instinctive reaction to believe that debate is the obvious form of research-communicative exchange of thoughts. Although debates have a role to play, they often serve as arenas for competing perspectives, all of which want to narrow our field of view. This is probably the last thing we need, if we want to open up for perspicuous understandings of ourselves as human beings, researchers, donors, entrepreneurs, healthcare professionals and patients. How do we relate to each other? How do I, as a donor of DNA to researchers, relate to the patients I want to help?

We need to think carefully about what it means to think freely, together, about common issues, such as the global sharing of genomic data.

Pär Segerdahl

Written by…

Pär Segerdahl, Associate Professor at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics and editor of the Ethics Blog.

Middleton A., Milne R. and Almarri M.A. et al. (2020). Global public perceptions of genomic data sharing: what shapes the willingness to donate DNA and health data? American Journal of Human Genetics. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2020.08.023

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We shape the societies that shape us: our responsibility for human nature

child's eye
5 October, 2020 / / 4 Comments

Visionary academic texts are rare – texts that shed light on how research can contribute to the perennial human issues. In an article in the philosophical journal Theoria, however, Kathinka Evers opens up a novel visionary perspective on neuroscience and tragic aspects of the human condition.

For millennia, sensitive thinkers have been concerned about human nature. Undoubtedly, we humans create prosperity and security for ourselves. However, like no other animal, we also have an unfortunate tendency to create misery for ourselves (and other life forms). The 20th century was extreme in both directions. What is the mechanism behind our peculiar, large-scale, self-injurious behavior as a species? Can it be illuminated and changed?

As I read her, Kathinka Evers asks essentially this big human question. She does so based on the current neuroscientific view of the brain, which she argues motivates a new way of understanding and approaching the mechanism of our species’ self-injurious behavior. An essential feature of the neuroscientific view is that the human brain is designed to never be fully completed. Just as we have a unique self-injurious tendency as a species, we are born with uniquely incomplete brains. These brains are under construction for decades and need good care throughout this time. They are not formed passively, but actively, by finding more or less felicitous ways of functioning in the societies to which we expose ourselves.

Since our brains shape our societies, one could say that we build the societies that build us, in a continual cycle. The brain is right in the middle of this sensitive interaction between humans and their societies. With its creative variability, the human brain makes many deterministic claims on genetics and our “innate” nature problematic. Why are we humans the way we are? Partly because we create the societies that create us as we are. For millennia, we have generated ourselves through the societies that we have built, ignorant of the hyper-interactive organ in the middle of the process. It is always behind our eyes.

Kathinka Evers’ point is that our current understanding of the brain as inherently active, dynamic and variable, gives us a new responsibility for human nature. She expresses the situation technically as follows: neuroscientific knowledge gives us a naturalistic responsibility to be epigenetically proactive. If we know that our active and variable brains support a cultural evolution beyond our genetic heritage, then we have a responsibility to influence evolution by adapting our societies to what we know about the strengths and weaknesses of our brains.

The notion of ​​a neuroscientific responsibility to design societies that shape human nature in desired ways may sound like a call for a new form of social engineering. However, Kathinka Evers develops the notion of ​​this responsibility in the context of a conscientious review of similar tendencies in our history, tendencies that have often revolved around genetics. The aim of epigenetic proaction is not to support ideologies that have already decided what a human being should be like. Rather, it is about allowing knowledge about the brain to inspire social change, where we would otherwise ignorantly risk recreating human misery. Of course, such knowledge presupposes collaboration between the natural, social and human sciences, in conjunction with free philosophical inquiry.

The article mentions juvenile violence as an example. In some countries, there is a political will to convict juvenile delinquents as if they were adults and even place them in adult prisons. Today, we know that during puberty, the brain is in a developmental crisis where important neural circuits change dramatically. Young brains in crisis need special care. However, in these cases they risk ending up in just the kind of social environments that we can predict will create more misery.

Knowledge about the brain can thus motivate social changes that reduce the peculiar self-injuring behavior of humanity, a behavior that has worried sensitive thinkers for millennia. Neuroscientific self-awareness gives us a key to the mechanism behind the behavior and a responsibility to use it.

Pär Segerdahl

Written by…

Pär Segerdahl, Associate Professor at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics and editor of the Ethics Blog.

Kathinka Evers. 2020. The Culture‐Bound Brain: Epigenetic Proaction Revisited. Theoria. doi:10.1111/theo.12264

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