Robot Therapies for Autistic Children Face a Hard Ethical Reckoning
Bioengineer.org
A critical review of six EU-funded social robotics projects for autistic children reveals a fundamental ethical issue: the uncritical assumption that therapy should aim to make autistic children behave like neurotypical children. Despite addressing some ethical concerns like privacy and safety, the projects largely overlooked deeper issues related to normalization and the potential harm of framing autism as a condition needing correction. Only two projects actively engaged with ethical concerns such as emotional attachment, deception, and robot autonomy.
All articles from 28 September 2026. Summaries are AI-generated and may contain errors; the linked article is the authority.