Issue Safety certification, liability, surveillance and trust dilemmas for autonomous care robots

Summary

Existing laws and institutions do not presuppose robots that learn and decide autonomously, so safety standards and liability rules for errors and misjudgements are missing. Continuous data collection by care robots creates ethical dilemmas over protecting patients' sensitive information, raising concerns about surveillance and bias. Social acceptance hinges on overcoming the psychological aversion known as the uncanny valley and a lack of trust. Technically, keeping physical AI autonomy at medical-grade reliability in real environments is the greatest challenge. The rigidity, precision and safety that medicine demands of robots still conflict with one another under current technology, and the clinical validity of the vast data from robot sensors is hard to guarantee.