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Abstract Oliver Blendel

Service Robots from an Ethical Point of View

Service robots are spreading more and more. They are in our apartments, in hotels, hospitals and care homes, in shopping malls and on company premises, they conquer the streets and squares of our cities. In doing so, various challenges arise. The service robots need energy, they take our place, we collide with them and stumble over them, they monitor and control us, they communicate with us and elicit our secrets. They can be hacked, kidnapped and abused. In the first part of the lecture, Oliver Bendel presents several types of service robots like security, transport, therapy and care robots and discusses moral implications that arise in their context. He takes the perspectives of both information ethics and machine ethics. In the second part, he discusses the draft of a patient decree, with which patients can determine whether and how they want to be treated and cared for by a robot. However, the specifications may violate personal interests or the business interests of the hospital or nursing home. Oliver Bendel explains why he still believes in such a patient decree