Call for paper Vol. 9, No. 1, June 2025
The growing impact of artificial intelligence in modern societies is leading to significant changes in everyday life and the patterns of relationships. Service robotics is providing more flexible systems, capable of operating beyond the context of industrial production and of interaction with human beings. If we add to this paradigm change the fact that in western societies the number of elderly people and people requiring daily care and assistance is growing, we can anticipate a near future in which social robots or assistive robots will be performing the main interventions in care and family relationships.
If caring for the disabled and elderly, especially if they are bedridden or suffer from debilitating illnesses, leads to increasing work for their carers, often family members themselves or specifically trained immigrants, this will mean not only an increase in costs for families, but also a failure properly to take into account the physical and emotional stress to which carers are subjected. This is why the possibility of using autonomous artificial agents is becoming more and more important, especially in countries where the population is getting older but with fewer and fewer births to allow a natural generational change.
But what might be the effects of AI and robotics on groups of people who are particularly fragile and vulnerable?
If autonomous systems are enabled to make life and death decisions, what about the dignity of the sick? What happens to the care relationship when the need for robot programming is introduced between doctor and patient? How is it possible to formulate a medical judgement that is accepted by the sick and their families if it becomes possible to delegate everything to autonomous artificial agents?
What happens, above all, to carers who are already marginalised and face an increased risk of going unrecognised, not only socially but even legally?
How can the ideals of distributive justice and equity be reconciled if the mass arrival of assistive robots widens the gap between those who have access to them and those who do not?
What forms of collective welfare and social justice should be pursued through the automation of services in health and social care? How can robots foster a process of environmental sustainability for the human species and the entire ecosystem?
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Authors are invited to follow the Author Guidelines in preparing the manuscript for submission. If necessary, the editors will exercise the right to alter/modify manuscripts in accordance with the stylistic and formal lines of the journal.
Submission of papers to Critical Hermeneutics is taken to imply that the manuscript is not under consideration by other journals, and that it is not a published work.
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- Subdivision of the article
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- References
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