Knowledge Isn’t Power: The Ethics of Social Robots and the Difficulty of Informed Consent

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Abstract

Contemporary robots are increasingly mimicking human social behaviours to facilitate interaction, such as smiling to signal approachability, or hesitating before taking an action to allow people time to react. Such techniques can activate a person's entrenched social instincts, triggering emotional responses as though they are interacting with a fellow human, and can prompt them to treat a robot as if it truly possesses the underlying life-like processes it outwardly presents, raising significant ethical questions. We engage these issues through the lens of informed consent: drawing upon prevailing legal principles and ethics, we examine how social robots can influence user behaviour in novel ways, and whether under those circumstances users can be appropriately informed to consent to these heightened interactions. We explore the complex circumstances of human-robot interaction and highlight how it differs from more familiar interaction contexts, and we apply legal principles relating to informed consent to social robots in order to reconceptualize the current ethical debates surrounding the field. From this investigation, we synthesize design goals for robot developers to achieve more ethical and informed human-robot interaction.

Publisher Link

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07942

Citation

James M. Berzuk, Lauren Corcoran, Brannen McKenzie-Lefurgey, Katie Szilagyi, and James E. Young. 2025. Knowledge Isn't Power: The Ethics of Social Robots and the Difficulty of Informed Consent. In submission to the International Journal of Social Robotics.