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New Robots and the Ten Ethical Laws Of Robotics
Roland Piquepaille writes "The robotics actuality is pretty rich these days. Besides the fighting robots of Robo-One and the flying microrobots from Epson (the best picture is at Ananova), here are some the latest intriguing news in robotics. In Japan, Yoshiyuki Sankai has built a robot suit, called Hybrid Assistive Limb-3 (or HAL-3), designed to help disabled or elderly people. In the U.S., Ohio State University is developing a robotic tomato harvester for the J.F. Kennedy Space Center while Northrop Grumman received $1 billion from the Pentagon to build a new robotic fighter. I kept the best for the end. A Californian counselor has just patented the ten ethical laws of robotics. A good read for a Sunday, if you can understand what he means. This summary only focuses on HAL-3 and one of the most incredible patents I've ever seen, so please read the above articles for more information about the other subjects."
I think robots are cool, so I checked these links out with interest, to find... WTF? What a horrible juxtaposition of real engineering with total mubo-jumbo bullshit. I hope the HAL-3 designers never find out they've been linked next to this stuff.
The author of the linking article admits he doesn't understand the 10 law stuff, but isn't quite confident enough to call it out as crap. It's crap. Sub-scientology nonsense that isn't even internally comprehensible.