Robotics in Germany and Japan DRESDEN PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY STUDIES DRESDNER STUDIEN ZUR PHILOSOPHIE DER TECHNOLOGIE Edited by /Herausgegeben von Bernhard Irrgang Vol./Bd. 5 Michael Funk / Bernhard Irrgang (eds.) Robotics in Germany and Japan Philosophical and Technical Perspectives Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robotics in Germany and Japan : philosophical and technical perspectives / Michael Funk, Bernhard Irrgang (eds.). pages cm ----- (Dresden philosophy of technology perspectives, ISSN 1861- -- 423X ; v. 5) ISBN 978-3-631-62071-7 ----- ISBN 978-3-653-03976-4 (ebook) 1. Robotics-----Germany----- Popular works. 2. Robotics----- Japan--Popular works. 3. Robotics-----Philosophy. I. Funk, Michael, 1985- -- editor of compilation. II. Irrgang, Bernhard, editor of compilation. TJ211.15.R626 2014 629.8'920943----- dc23 2013045885 Cover illustration: Humanoid Robot “ARMAR” (KIT, Germany), Photograph: Michael Funk An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org ISSN 1861-423X • ISBN 978-3-631-62071-7 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-03976-4 (E-PDF) • E-ISBN 978-3-653-99964-8 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-653-99963-1 (MOBI) • DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-03976-4 Open Access: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 unported license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This publication has been peer reviewed. © Michael Funk / Bernhard Irrgang, 2014 Peter Lang GmbH International Academic Publishers Berlin www.peterlang.com Preface Germany and Japan are two of the worldwide leading countries in robotics re- search. Robotics is a key technology and it brings about technical tasks for engi- neers, but also philosophical and cultural challenges. How are we going to use robots that have a human-like appearance in everyday life? What is technologi- cally possible? What are the cultural similarities and differences between Ger- many and Japan? Those are some of the questions discussed in the book. Five chapters embrace an intercultural and interdisciplinary framework including cur- rent research fields like Roboethics, Hermeneutics of Technologies, Technology Assessment, Robotics in Japanese Popular Culture and Music Robots. Contribu- tions on cultural interrelations, technical visions and essays round the volume off. Most of the contributions in this book are based on the lectures of the con- ference “Future of Robotics in Germany and Japan” (TU Dresden, November 11-12, 2010), which was made possible and kindly supported by • Fritz Thyssen Stiftung and • MEXT Global COE Program: The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy (UTCP), JSPS Kakenhi (Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research), No. 21520004. The editors would like to express their thankfulness! Moreover we also give our thanks to Andreas Bork, Paul Stadelhofer and Beatrix Weber most sincerely for proofreading. Michael Funk & Bernhard Irrgang Table of Contents Introduction From Fiction to Science: A German-Japanese Era-Project ...................................................... 11 Walther Ch. Zimmerli Philosophical Frameworks Robotics as a Future Vision for Hypermodern Technologies ................................................... 29 Bernhard Irrgang Roboethics and the Synthetic Approach – A Perspective on Roboethics from Japanese Robotics Research .......................................... 45 Kohji Ishihara Robotic Appearances and Forms of Life. A Phenomenological-Hermeneutical Approach to the Relation between Robotics and Culture ........................................................ 59 Mark Coeckelbergh Humanoid Robots and Human Knowing – Perspectivity and Hermeneutics in Terms of Material Culture ............................................. 69 Michael Funk Technology Assessment Who is taking over? Technology Assessment of Autonomous (Service) Robots ................... 91 Michael Decker Popular Culture and Music Robots Robots in Japanese Popular Culture ....................................................................................... 113 Maika Nakao Understanding the Feasibility and Applicability of the Musician-Humanoid Interaction Research: A Study of the Impression of the Musical Interaction ......................... 125 Jorge Solis & Atsuo Takanishi Mozart to Robot – Cultural Challenges of Musical Instruments ........................................... 135 Michael Funk & Jörg Jewanski Essays Android Robots between Service and the Apocalypse of the Human Being......................... 147 Gerd Grübler Joseph Weizenbaum, Responsibility and Humanoid Robots................................................. 163 Kerstin Palatini Social Stereotypes as a Guarantee for Proper Human-Robot Interaction? Remarks to an Anthropomorphic Robot Design .................................................................... 171 Manja Unger-Büttner Authors and Contact............................................................................................................... 179 Introduction From Fiction to Science: A German-Japanese Era-Project Walther Ch. Zimmerli Introduction What I am planning to do is to discuss in the first step robots as a philosophical problem. In the second step I would like to draw our attention to a previous ver- sion of that question, which was very popular when we were still dealing with the philosophical standard problems of Artificial Intelligence: the question of human minds and machines. Afterwards I would like to have a look at the trans- formation of the Artificial-Intelligence-discussion into the robotics-discussion and even further on beyond the notion of software, which will be decisive for my ideas. And by doing this I would finally like to focus on the question regard- ing cultural differences, more specifically: on the cultural differences between Asian (especially Japanese) and the European (especially the German) way of talking as well as thinking about and constructing of robots or of robotics.1 Before we do that, however, we have to ask ourselves: What are the prob- lems with robotics or robots? One of the problems can even be seen reading the wordplay on the signs in the hall pointing to our “robotic conference.” If it would be a conference on robots mainly or on robotics, it would read “robotics conference.” But it says “robotic conference,” which could result in the obvious- ly somewhat misleading conclusion that we all here are robots, which is howev- er, philosophically speaking, not so farfetched. Because as we all know and as I will be elaborating in what follows: within the European Philosophy the idea of artificial human beings has been inherent in our humanistic tradition since its very beginning. Even before mankind actually developed machines in the strict sense of the word, the idea of human beings as a certain kind of machines was already discussed. And that will be just one of the aspects, which we will be dealing with. As another preliminary remark I would like to focus on the problem, wheth- er the question concerning robots is pointing to one of the decisive characteris- tics of our time. To put it differently: whether it is true or not that robots will be- come or have already become one of the main features in the development of our society? This question includes two other questions: the question concerning robots, these little individual entities, beings, gadgets and the context in which 1 As far back as 1989 I published an article “Human Minds, Robots, and the Technician of the Future” (Zimmerli 1989). At that time the AI-discussion as well as the debate on ro- bots was almost a part of the philosophy of mind. Today, however, the discourse on both AI and robotization are strongly influenced by the network-paradigm and the subsequent ideas on globalization. Therefore the deliberations in this article are to be considered as a revision of my previous ideas in the light of the overwhelming omnipresence of a global- ized network, i.e. the WWW. 12 Walther Ch. Zimmerli they interact with human beings on the one hand and robotics in the perspective of an academic discipline on the other. So the question I will begin with reads: “Is it true that robots will become or have already become one of the main features in the development of our socie- ty?” And everyone who is philosophically trained knows, of course, that here we are running into some kind of an immanently contradiction. It is a contradiction between true and will. As is well known this is an Aristotelian problem. How do we decide on the truth value of a proposition in the future tense? Since Aristotle we know that this is impossible. We do not have any way of deciding, whether a proposition in the future tense is true or not, unless it is changing from a propo- sition about the future into a descriptive proposition about the presence (cf. Aris- totle, Perihermeneias, 18b ff.). So what we are actually asking when we ask: “Is it true that robots will become one of the main features in the development of our society?” is: “Is it a