Social and ethical considerations for agricultural robotics

This chapter explores the social and ethical implications of scaling agricultural robotics. Despite the many promises offered by robots, a large number of social science studies have highlighted their potential to create winners and losers, which complicates the notion that their use will usher in a triumphant fourth agricultural revolution (see reviews by Klerkx et al., 2019; Fielke et al., 2020; also van der Burg et al., 2019). We use a responsible innovation framework to frame discussion of these debates (see e.g. Bronson, 2019; Eastwood et al., 2019; Rose and Chilvers, 2018; Regan, 2019). Responsible innovation contains four components (Stilgoe et al., 2013) – anticipation, inclusion, reflexivity, responsiveness – and methods for agriculture specifically have been outlined by Eastwood et al. (2019). We explore the social and ethical implications of agricultural robotics, and more importantly, what we can do to include and listen to a wide range of stakeholders when developing and scaling this technology.