A staple of science fiction, an exoskeleton is a powered frame that attaches to the body to provide support and strength. The movie Live, Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow featured combat exoskeletons as does the video game Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. These fictional devices allow combatants to run faster and longer while carrying heavier loads, giving them an advantage in combat. There are also peaceful applications of the technology, such as allowing people with injuries to walk and augmenting human abilities for the workplace. For those concerned with fine details of nerdiness, exoskeletons should not be confused with cybernetic parts (these fully replace body parts, such as limbs or eyes) or powered armor (like that used in the novel Starship Troopers and by Iron Man).
As with almost any new technology, the development of exoskeletons raises some ethical questions. Fortunately for addressing these questions, humans have been using technological enhancements since we started being human, so this is old and familiar territory. Noel Sharkey raises one moral concern, namely that “You could have exoskeletons on building sites that would help people not get so physically tired, but working longer would make you mentally tired and we don’t have a means of stopping that.” His proposed solution is an exoskeleton that switches off after six hours.
This same sort of problem arose, obviously enough, when humans developed much earlier technology that allowed people to work physically for a long time. For example, the development of factory and farming equipment allowed people to do what was once heavy labor with far greater ease, enabling them to work even longer hours. Technology has made the labor even easier—for example, a worker can drive a high-tech farm combine as easily as driving a car. Closer analogies to exoskeletons include such things as fork-lifts and cranes: a person can operate those to easily lift heavy loads that would exhaust (or be impossible for) people just using their muscles. As such, Sharkey’s concern would also apply to the forklift—a person could drive one around for six hours and not be very tired physically, yet mentally tired. As such, whatever moral solutions that apply to the problem of forklifts would also apply to exoskeletons.
Mental overwork is also, obviously enough, not a problem limited to exoskeletons in particular or technology in general. After all, many jobs today are not very physically tiring, and people can keep at writing legal briefs, teaching classes and managing workers to the point that they are mentally exhausted but not physically exhausted.
For those who consider such overwork to be undesirable, the solution lies in workplace regulation or the hope that employers will do the right thing on their own. If there were not regulations protecting workers from being overworked, in the future employers would presumably simply either buy exoskeletons without timers or develop work-arounds, such as resetting timers.
Also, exoskeletons themselves do not get tired, so putting a timer on an exoskeleton would be like putting a use timer on a forklift at a warehouse. Doing so would reduce the value of the equipment, since it could not be used by multiple shifts. As such, that sort of timer system would be unfair to the employers—they would be paying for equipment that could be used round the clock, but only able to use it for a limited time each day. Of course, there could be a system in place so that the timer is linked to the worker—the exoskeleton would still work for a worker that had not worked six hours. This, however, still creates some obvious problems about incorporating work limits into hardware rather than by using regulation and policy about the limits of work. In any case, while exoskeletons would be new in the workplace, they would not add anything new to the moral landscape—technology that allows workers to be mentally overworked while not being physically overworked is nothing new and existing solutions can be applied when exoskeletons become part of the workplace, just as was done when forklifts were introduced.
“in the future employers would presumably simply either buy exoskeletons without timers or develop work-arounds, such as resetting timers.”
There is an inherent mistrust of free enterprise and capitalism in so many of your posts. Perhaps this view of employers might have been applicable during the Industrial Revolution or in some imagined dystopian future, but I think that for the most part, business owners today understand that when workers are happy they are more productive. Take a look at the way companies like Google and Apple treat their employees, for example. (I had an extremely competitive, highly driven student last year who did an internship at Pixar – when he came back he said he had to re-think his entire approach to life. The most difficult thing for him to understand was that Pixar insisted that their employees go home at the end of the day, that they pursue individual recreation, that they collaborate and support each other. He said that a healthy “work/life balance” was a priority for them).
For those who haven’t seen this light, there are fair labor laws, OSHA regulations, and other watchdog agencies to ensure that workers are protected.
An interesting aspect of this to consider is that fine line between the use of exoskeletons to increase human productivity and the replacement of humans by robots altogether. In the middle of this, of course, would be robots that have to be operated by humans.
One could take the negative approach to both – presuming, as you did, that exoskeletons would provide employers with new and different means of exploiting workers, yet projecting that the outright replacement of humans by robots would cause increased unemployment and economic disaster …
Or one could take the positive side – that exoskeletons would increase productivity and open the door to new and different approaches to a healthy work/life balance, and that replacing humans with robots would spare humans from rote, mentally & physically tiring work and make them more available for more creative, intellectual, and fulfilling work.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote a wonderful satire on the use of a kind of exoskeleton in his short story, “Harrison Bergeron”. Rather than using external devices to increase productivity, however, in this story the external devices were used to level the playing field in some kind of misplaced attempt at “fairness”. In the story, characters who were inherently stronger than others were made to carry weights to artificially disable them in some way – those who were intellectually superior were outfitted with devices that emitted high-pitched noises to break their concentration.
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that there is no need to worry about exoskeleton ethics until a problem presents itself.
Once upon a time, universities and colleges would employ star athletes to keep alligators out of the gym and to chase any wayward elephants off of the football field. Don’t know why that little factoid bubbled up in my head just now. Thought I’d share it though. The more you know, eh?
I presume you are speaking symbolically – “Alligators” meaning wealthy preppies who wear those expensive Izod/LaCoste polo shirts, and “Elephants” meaning “Republicans. We don’t need either of these creatures hanging around, do we?
Nah…wasn’t going that deep. Unless I did so subconsciously…hmmm. I think you’ve taken too many literature courses 😉 . Was really just an extemporaneous riff. Kinda predicting Mike’s “Just a matter of time…” comment. If the great philosophers think real hard about the problem, it will scare people away from the problem ever presenting itself, thus justifying their existence. Kinda like if the job does not exist, it has to be invented. Like I said, just a snarky little riff. For fun and stuff. See Deep Thought and HHGTTG.
Just a matter of time. I’m guessing that there will be attempts to use them to cheat at sports when they are concealable–there are already plans to incorporate them into clothing.