On Building Responsible Robots

Rapid progress in robotics and AI potentially pose huge challenges regarding several roles that used to be traditionally reserved for human agents: Human core competences such as autonomy, agency, and responsibility might one day apply to artificial systems as well. I will give an overview on the philosophical discipline of robot ethics via the phenomenon of responsibility as a crucial human competence. In a first step I will ask for the traditional understanding of the term “responsibility and formulate a minimal definition that exclusively includes the necessary etymological elements as the ‘lowest common denominator’ of the responsibility concept: Responsibility as the ability to answer is a normative concept that rests on the assumption that the responsible subject in question is equipped with a specific psycho-motivational constitution. In a second step I will outline my understanding of the discipline of robot ethics, in order to ask in a third step how to ascribe responsibility in man-machine-interaction. For these purposes I will elaborate on my concept of responsibility networks.