Ethical governance of AI-based humanoid carebots: the case for Ethics of Techno-care

The reality of ageing population, with loneliness among older people recognised as a public health concern, and a significant shortage of caregivers—call for techno-creative solutions. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based humanoid carebots (AIhCs) are one emerging solution, where care for humans is being outsourced to robots, in what we dub as “techno-care”. The humanisation of carebots, employing anthropomorphism to influence care-recipients’ trust in and compliance with AIhCs, is a key issue, uniquely involving deception to achieve care-related goals, which may violate care-recipients’ autonomy, among other things. This problem, and other autonomy-related issues, underscore the need for techno-care-specific ethical governance. We therefore set out to examine the appropriateness of existing ethical frameworks for governing AIhC design and implementation, focusing on autonomy and transparency, which are fundamental for AIhC ethicality. We intuitively start by considering the more novel frameworks of AI ethics and roboethics, then move to examine the well-established bioethics and ethics of care (EoC) frameworks. Our analysis concludes that no existing ethical framework adequately copes with the autonomy-related and other challenges of techno-care by AIhCs. We consequently suggest that a new derivative framework needs to be developed and applied to this setting—that of “ethics of techno-care” (EtC). We first distinguish EoC care setting and care-relationships from those of EtC, then offer a preliminary outline for this new normative guidance, comprised of the following key elements: human care-sensitive design, minimally-necessary deception, techno-care transparency, techno-care privacy design, techno-care autonomy, techno-care responsibility and accountability, and diversity and cultural sensitivity in AIhC design.