Surgical, therapeutic, nursing and sex robots in machine and information ethics

Oliver Bendel

pp. 17-32

in: Simon van Rysewyk, Matthijs Pontier (eds), Machine medical ethics, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

Machine medical ethics is a novel field of research for ethicists, philosophers, artificial intelligence experts, information scientists, and medical specialists. I identify surgical, therapeutic, nursing and sex robots as the primary types of medical machines in this context. I raise general questions about machine ethics with a view to its development and application, specific questions about medical machine ethics (the term and concept which I prefer), and broad questions spanning multiple non-machine ethics, including information, technology, business and legal ethics, and interrelationships between these diverse ethics and machine medical ethics. Samples of each type of question are provided in my descriptions of surgical, therapeutic, nursing and sex robots. In particular, progress in information and technology ethics is needed in order to solve moral problems involving medical machines, and progress in machine ethics to prevent some of the problems.