I don't Want You to Die: A Shared Responsibility Framework for Safeguarding Child-Robot Companionship

TL;DR

This paper explores the shared responsibility among stakeholders for safeguarding children’s emotional well-being when social robot services like Moxie are discontinued, highlighting varied perceptions and proposing a responsibility framework.

Contribution

It introduces an empirically grounded framework for shared responsibility in child-robot companionship, informed by qualitative survey data and analysis of stakeholder perspectives.

Findings

Responsibility is viewed as shared among companies, parents, developers, and government.

Perceptions of service continuation are highly polarized based on political and parental status.

Stakeholders propose diverse pathways for continuity and express concerns about emotional dependency.

Abstract

Social robots like Moxie are designed to form strong emotional bonds with children, but their abrupt discontinuation can cause significant struggles and distress to children. When these services end, the resulting harm raises complex questions of who bears responsibility when children's emotional bonds are broken. Using the Moxie shutdown as a case study through a qualitative survey of 72 U.S. participants, our findings show that the responsibility is viewed as a shared duty across the robot company, parents, developers, and government. However, these attributions varied by political ideology and parental status of whether they have children. Participants' perceptions of whether the robot service should continue are highly polarized; supporters propose technical, financial, and governmental pathways for continuity, while opponents cite business realities and risks of unhealthy emotional dependency. Ultimately, this research contributes an empirically grounded shared responsibility framework for safeguarding child-robot companionship by detailing how accountability is distributed and contested, informing concrete design and policy implications to mitigate the emotional harm of robot discontinuation.