Robotics in Care Services: A Finnish Roadmap
Published: 7.6.2017
Robotics for care are believed to hold great potential for increasing the productivity and quality of health care and welfare service provision. In order to support this view, a roadmap is conceived that aims to provide an overview and future directions of care services, the technologies that assist such services and how it affects the innovation and business ecosystem.
The main mission for this roadmap is to inform the discussion as well as to engage in the debate of the opportunities and challenges in the Finnish context. The roadmap provides recommendations on policy and identifies open research directions. In its current form, the roadmap was released to the general public and the Finnish government body in June 2017. As a living document, the roadmap will be revised in the future and released on suitable occasions.
From Terminators to Careminators
Published: 20.2.2017
Robotics has wide potential of improving people’s quality of life. Developing an ecosystem of service robotics pursues a solution especially to the growing need for social and health care of elderly people. However, utilizing robots in the welfare sector is a world of multiple contraries, differing attitudes and balancing between beneficence and nonmaleficence. Do robots cause jobs being terminated – or rather increase work opportunities? Is a heavy-lifting robot also a security hazard? Will social robots decrease loneliness or cut out all human contacts? Are social robots terminators or careminators?
Should robots be electronic persons or slaves?
Published: 19.9.2016
Public discussion about robotics lead very quickly to philosophical depths. Consider the nuanced parliamentary motion concerning Europe-wide legislative framework for robotics and AI. It made headlines for suggesting, for purposes of legislation on liability and responsibility, a new legal status of “electronic persons, with specific rights and obligations, including that of making good any damage they may cause”.
The (Care) Robot in Science Fiction – A Monster or a Tool for the Future?
Published: 21.11.2016
Quite recently, care robots have begun an invasion into our lives and have given rebirth to the hopes and concerns considering both utopian and dystopian technological futures. When introducing a new generation of service robots in our daily lives, it is therefore interesting and important to consider how they have already been imagined in science fiction, as these imaginations can be used to make visible the problems as well as promises inherent in close relationships between humans and machines. The main motivation of this short introduction to science fiction is to enhance dialogue on the human and non-human dimensions of robots.
