Social robotics and deception: beyond the ethical approach

Social robots are designed to directly interact with users, to collaborate with them and to act in a human-centred environment, with different degrees of automation. In order to encourage acceptability and trust, they are structured as so to leverage the human tendency to anthropomorphise what they interact with. It follows that some machines are able to simulate the feeling of genuine emotions or empathy, to appear needy of help, to pretend to have an own rersonality and – more in general – to induce the user to think that they are something more than mere objects. Thus, it may be argued that such interaction could lead to forms of manipulation that fall within the remit of a deceptive dynamic. Such a phenomenon is still much debated by the scientific community and raises significant concerns regarding long-term ethical and psychological repercussions on the users. This paper investigates which tools we have and which ones we may need to tackle the theme of deception in social robotics. Therefore, both ethical and legal perspectives are reconstructed, with the attempt to try to distinguish their respective scope and to emphasise their fruitful in tegration in addressing these issues. Finally, the possible relevance of fundamental human rights in human-robot interaction dynamics is dis cussed, due to their ability to reconcile ethical demands with the binding feature of legal norms.