Learning from the Future: Consequences of Robots

Abstract

Social robotics is contributing to the reshaping of key moral concepts by extending the circle of ethical concerns to bodies other than human which nonetheless engage us as companions, substitutes, or proxies. These encounters call for a moral evaluation, and in the essay I distinguish two paths along which such venture might be undertook: one hinged on the reflection upon their moral statute and another focused on the consequences of their presence. I then proceed with a further distinction, internal to the latter option, between descriptive and therapeutic understandings of the consequences of robots. In order to showcase such complexity, I make reference to some selected episodes from the TV series Black Mirror (2011-2025), in which the moral salience of robots issues from the complex dynamics in which they partake to, in unanticipated and sometimes unprecedented reactions to them driven by our ambivalent quest for certainty.