HackingTheUniverse

Isaac Asimov may have been the first to propose rules of ethics for robots, but he won’t be the last. As AI and robots become more integrated into our daily lives, the ethical considerations that govern their actions will become more important. The ethics of robots is becoming an issue in our everyday lives.

Robot warriors will get a guide to ethics – [msnbc.mns.com]

Ronald Arkin, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is in the first stages of developing an “ethical governor,” a package of software and hardware that tells robots when and what to fire. His book on the subject, “Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots,” comes out this month.

He argues not only can robots be programmed to behave more ethically on the battlefield, they may actually be able to respond better than human soldiers.

“Ultimately these systems could have more information to make wiser decisions than a human could make,” said Arkin. “Some robots are already stronger, faster and smarter than humans. We want to do better than people, to ultimately save more lives.”

Living Safely with Robots, Beyond Asimov’s Laws

One guiding principle of the proposed framework is categorizing robots as “third existence” entities, since Next Generation Robots are considered to be neither living/biological (first existence) or non-living/non-biological (second existence). A third existence entity will resemble living things in appearance and behavior, but will not be self-aware. While robots are currently legally classified as second existence (human property), the authors believe that a third existence classification would simplify dealing with accidents in terms of responsibility distribution.

One important challenge involved in integrating robots into human society deals with “open texture risk” – risk occurring from unpredictable interactions in unstructured environments. An example of open texture risk is getting robots to understand the nuances of natural (human) language. While every word in natural language has a core definition, the open texture character of language allows for interpretations that vary due to outside factors. As part of their safety intelligence concept, the authors have proposed a “legal machine language,” in which ethics are embedded into robots through code, which is designed to resolve issues associated with open texture risk – something which Asimov’s Three Laws cannot specifically address.

Toward the Human-Robot Co-Existence Society: On Safety Intelligence for Next Generation Robots

Abstract
Technocrats from many developed countries, especially Japan and South Korea, are preparing for the human-robot co-existence society that they believe will emerge by 2030. Regulators are assuming that within the next two decades, robots will be capable of adapting to complex, unstructured environments and interacting with humans to assist with the performance of daily life tasks. Unlike heavily regulated industrial robots that toil in isolated settings, Next Generation Robots will have relative autonomy, which raises a number of safety issues that are the focus of this article. Our purpose is to describe a framework for a legal system focused on Next Generation Robots safety issues, including a Safety Intelligence concept that addresses robot Open-Texture Risk. We express doubt that a model based on Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics can ever be a suitable foundation for creating an artificial moral agency ensuring robot safety. Finally, we make predictions about the most significant Next Generation Robots safety issues that will arise as the human-robot co-existence society emerges.

Trust me, I’m a robot – [economist.com]

Regulating the behaviour of robots is going to become more difficult in the future, since they will increasingly have self-learning mechanisms built into them, says Gianmarco Veruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, Italy. As a result, their behaviour will become impossible to predict fully, he says, since they will not be behaving in predefined ways but will learn new behaviour as they go.