The Question of Robot Safety

An anonymous reader writes to mention an Economist article wondering how safe should robots be? From the article: "In 1981 Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot. This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behavior was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction writer." The article goes on to explore the ethics behind robot soldiers, the liability issues of cleaning droids, and the moral problems posed by sexbots.

Comments

Fear them!

[dreemernj]

Fear the Roomba!

Re:Fear them!

[llamalicious]

Now I know why I haven't seen my cats all day. Better empty the Roomba.

I for one

[Digitus1337]

...am for guidelines to govern the actions of our new robot overlords.

Re:Virtual bots

[Schemat1c]

The dangers of robots are worse than you think, just watch this PSA. And remember, when they grab you with those metal claws you can't break free cause they're made of metal, and they're very strong.

Re:Christ, not again.

[grammar fascist]

same reason why people always bring up the Moore's law whenever people talk about processor speeds.

Or Godwin's law, like any time at all.

Re:Virtual bots

[KiloByte]

Self awareness is a side effect of general intelligence. We can't make it yet, but when we can it will be useful.

Of course! The moment we can make general intelligence, it will be a big improvement, for any species.
This whole article, for example, is a case of failing an intelligence check.
Hint: it's not the robot who failed it.

Re:Virtual bots

[Ohreally_factor]

There was a movie based on I, Robot? Woah! I had thought that there was only a 115 minute commercial advertisement based on I, Robot.

Not the Robot's fault?

[iendedi]

This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behavior was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction writer"

Neither would this have happened if the maintenance tech had followed procedure and just switched the damned thing off. I don't see how this is any different from a normal industrial accident with something like a sheet metal press.

Oh come on, the submitter is on to something here. The manufacturer of the robotic manufacturing equipment most definitely should have encoded the three laws into their manufacturing robots. It couldn't be too hard, right?

Here, I'll show you... Where did I put my wrench?

Re:Wrong kind of robots

[Jeremi]

But what does that mean, "arms"? Does it mean just guns? Surely it doesn't. It means whatever weapons deemed necessary to overthrow a corrupt government.

Clearly, it means nukes. Only with the force of Mutually Assured Destruction on our side can we be sure that we could, if push came to shove, defeat our nuclear-armed government. Which is why I advocate providing one free nuclear device to each American citizen on his/her 18th birthday. Only then can we have the violence-free utopian society we've all dreamed of.

Re:Christ, not again.

[roman_mir]

Hold on, hold on, how about all 3 laws into one?

A robot's ability to speak of Nazis grows by a factor of 2 every 18 months! :/