Persuasive Robotic Technologies and the Freedom of Choice and Action

摘要

Through their recontextualization of freedom and their impact on users as moral agents, these intelligent, persuasive technologies shape a new ethical landscape bound to action, habit, and device. Persuasive technologies are innately bound to moral discourses, albeit those which pertain to minute rather than momentous deliberations, and as such cannot be perceived a morally neutral or peripheral to ethical considerations. Engaging in habitual tasks, seemingly the operation of these devices is of little ethical concern; and yet, offering familiar albeit perhaps more efficient mechanisms of self-regulation and normalization, the deployment of these devices both challenges and reshapes users' abilities to choose and to act freely. The confluence of the individuated and social dimensions of intelligent devices that perform as self-nudging mechanisms merits further investigation. The chapter examines if ethical challenges have been shaped by the unique techno-human conditions that persuasive devices facilitate, and if so, what these may be.