Authors
Tom Williams and Salem J. Elzway
Venue
International Journal of Social Robotics
Publication Year
2026
Most contemporary work on robot ethics is highly disconnected from the history of robotics, and indeed the history of robotics is too often reduced to touchstones like Unimate, Rossum's Universal Robots, and Asimov's laws of robotics — which, when removed from their larger historical context, lose much of their importance. We argue that robot ethicists must contextualize their work relative to the history of robotics in order to understand, critique, and present solutions to today's most pressing robot ethics concerns. In this paper, we demonstrate this through analysis of the cultural, geopolitical, and economic climate that motivated and shaped the robots of the 1950's, drawing parallels in each case to modern robot ethics concerns. We call for roboticists to better contextualize their work relative to the historical origins of their field.
