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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.
Asimov's rules were always applied to intelligent robots. No-one (to my knowledge) has ever suggested that a hammer should have a sensor to recognise if it is hitting a nail or a thumb and refuse to obey the "command" of its operator if it is targetting the latter. The purpose of Asimov's three rules was to prevent himself from falling into the trap of writing yet another Frankenstein story. That said, I believe there are some proponents of handgun biometrics that believe guns should override the commands of their operators if the operator is not authorized to use it. In the future you may not be able to (legally) purchase a handgun that will fire on a human being.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Asimov's Laws of Robotics
More accurately, John W. Campbell's laws.
"Asimov attributes the Three Laws to John W. Campbell from a conversation which took place on December 23, 1940. However, Campbell claims that Asimov had the Laws already in his mind, and they simply needed to be stated explicitly"
Whoa, transport me back to when E.L.O.'s "Time" album came out (Yikes! 1981) and the song "Yours Truly 2095":
But I digress (before I was ever on topic)... there won't be any moral dilemma for this crowd. The first sexbots will be programmed for "No Geeks" which will only increase their allure for that very crowd. They'll be hacked to remove that restriction, and while they're at it they'll be programmed to hang out at retirement homes, PTA meetings and church services. That'll pretty much doom them to be recalled, pulled from the market, and there'll be only a few remaining examples in the Smithsonian and certain institutions of higher learning for, ummm, "research".
Remember, you read it here first.
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
I'd be wary of a Turing sex test.
I'm a post-grad student working on a robot helicopter. It has extremely fast rotor blades and is a very real threat to humans if mishandled, so I can speak from personal experience in working on robot safety critical systems. To me, robot safety is more of the same problem faced by machine safety in general and more of the same problems faced by robots in particular.
Firstly all potentially dangerous machines require correct operation to avoid injury. No one can stop an idiot from ignoring a safety railing of a machine, automatic or robotic. To expect safety after defeating barriers and interlocks is stupid for microwave ovens and toasters, let alone high energy robotic systems. To expect robots to be safe outside of their defined operating parameters is like expecting a car to be made of sponge so no matter how much you ignore the speed limit, you can't kill anyone.
Secondly, robots seem to suffer a higher demand for intrinsic safety because of the expectation of robot cognition. The reality is, this is the place in robotics where the technology least developed. How do people possibly expect a robot to implement the three laws if the robot cannot flawlessly recognise a human as human? Furthermore, the three laws make no sense for a system that generally works far removed from humans. Putting the sensors and intelligence into a factory robot that should never encounter a human in its powered up state is just stupid. A simple barrier or laser curtain is more than adequate as an interlock, but as we've seen, that doesn't keep humans out all the time. The best the industrial roboticist can practically do is build robot systems that are reliable and stay within their work envelopes.
For mobile systems like my helicopter, it becomes more difficult since you can't control its workspace - cognition bites you in the arse once again. However, the reality of robot-human safety is that dangerous robots working around humans simply should not be autonomous without direct supervision. We are decades away from machines that are autonomously safe around humans. Software is brittle and easy to confuse no matter how well coded it is - you just can't capture all of the edge cases in the real world when you have millions of possible states. Don't imagine robot helicopters flying around people without a monkey in control - it just won't happen.
It seems to me that people need to change their idea of robots away from R2-D2 and towards reality. Treat industrial robots like an piece of industrial equipment - with respect. The same idiots who jump the fence of a robot workcell are probably the same idiots who misuse power tools and ignore safety directives. You just can't stop idiots from earning darwin awards. Seriously, it's not hard to stay outside the yellow tape.
Take your three laws and return them to science fiction, from which they came - they belong to the same realm of fantasy as FTL travel - which is to say, maybe one day but not for a long time.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
As someone who works in Robotics, I find this argument quite silly. Before I say why, let me state that Japan put down laws for robots and their interaction with humans a couple of weeks ago, about the time of a conference in Indiana known as the International Conference for Developmental Learning. This conference attracts the best roboticists from the world - some of them the original brains behind the famous japanese robots. Some of them might even have helped draft those laws - in all probability, they did. But the robots and ethics talk in the conference which followed it was nothing but an (almost) empty discussion of matters not likely to crop up in less than 20 years. And none of the roboticists bothered joining in. In fact, most of the audience seemed to consist of people not directly involved in robotics. Why?
The reason no one is concerned about robots going haywire, ethics in relation to robots, and related matters is that all these machines need a huge amount of computing power to achieve even a modicum of intelligence or autonomous action. Case in point - the most intelligent robot you can think of. Leo at MIT is one candidate. Most others tend to be glorified bodies and heads pre programmed to do stuff. Leo needs the equivalent of a 25 node cluster to function properly, and is even then confined to the top of a table. Sure, its expressive. It looks like it can learn from experience. It can do various hand gestures, and movements of all sorts. Great. But the moment you disconnect it from its host computer, its nothing but a glorified toy.
Translate that computing power into something which can be carried around by such an entity - and you're looking at a level of miniaturization I don't supposed possible for another 10 years. And by then, any laws or analysis which is made of these issues are going to be outdated because there is no way such a framework is going to carry on then. Robots may have biological components, they may have human parts, humans may have bionic parts - there are endless combinations of things, most of which wouldn't be visualized today.
As for asimov's 3 laws - no roboticist in the research arena has even thought about incorporating it because they *know* that these robots can do nothing without a lot of support from humans. Coming to the incident with the japanese engineer getting killed - most people would term that as an industrial accident, not the efforts of robots to kill humans. And as for sensors and things - whoever talks about human proximity sensors that advanced existing in industrial robots - does so through a hat.
If Bill Gates had a dime for every time a Windows box crashed...oh, wait a minute - he already does.
Put a brain that is able to become self-aware of itself in my dishwasher, my car-maker industrial robot or my robocop and I won't guarantee you may not have any problem. Quite the reverse.
Of Code And Men
The next DARPA Grand Challenge requires operating in congested areas, and that's going to require serious work on robot vehicle safety. The way this is going, those things are going to be rolling through small towns in hostile territory in a few years, and they'd better not be running over little kids.
Actually, there are very good reasons to make a robot aware of its own existence. Certain types of reasoning and learning are helped significantly by the ability to reason about the existence of oneself.
Consider the following experiment, which toddlers have difficulty performing prior to 4 years, but are able to after. A tube is presented to them, with the logo of a candy company on it, "smarties," not the American ones, but the British ones. The child is asked, what is in this tube? At this point, the child invariably says, "smarties!" The conductor of the experiment then opens the tube, revealing pencils. The experimenter asks again, "what is in this tube?" The child says, "pencils." Now, "if I ask another child what is in this tube, what do you think they will say?" Before 4, the kid will say, "pencils." After, they will say, "smarties."
This reasoning task requires the kid to model themselves prior to the revelation that there are pencils in the tube. It requires a model of what happened after. It, further, requires a model of the other child, of what they will be like without this knowledge. This is actually part of a model of self-awareness, but it's not the entire model. You might ask, "why would a robot need to know this?" Well, actually, it's quite important if the robot is to interract with people, because people will expect the robot to behave in an appropriate manner. Dangerous scenarios could arise because the robot does not understand that things that are in its field of view, for instance, are not in the field of view of a person. An example might be a robot handling dangerous materials, during a construction task. Perhaps the person can't see that it's handling hot metal. A person would warn the other person, avoiding danger.
As for the three laws, they were written in a body of fiction. I think that too much attention is paid to them.
yeh seriously, how would the three laws have helped if the 'robot' didn't have advanced enough eyes along with powerful enough image processing to know that a human was getting close to it and stepping in its way?
But the thing about the 3 laws of robotics, from my point of view is that you do not have to take them *literally*, or at least, try to take them in the broad sense of meaning.
See, Asimov laws where inteded for a ficticious kind of robots with something called the "positronic" brain.
But, if you think on what A.I. is now (I myself research into this field), the real utility of the rules comes as the "design" of these robots. This means, that the creators of the robots should follow all the pertinent precautions in order to make the robots mechanism (as complex or simple it is) to obbey those rules (which are something like, 1. Do not harm a human been, 2. Obbey a human been 3. Survive).
Of course robots today are not complex enough to "reason" about any of the rules, at least not "reason" as we know (well, anyone here knows how do we reason anyway?). But the rules apply more in an abstract way. As far as I remember, Asimov never said how where the rules embeded in the robots (other than in the heart of their *positronic* robots), but that the robots followed those rules.
I think, overall the current robots are created more or less to enforce those rules, of course in the case of the robot from the article the warning mechanism would be a flashing light or something more subtle. Ultimately it is the work of humans to create these robots, and with the focus in reducing development costs it is up to the safety standards organisms to raise the minimum requirments for manufacturing/mechanical and other kind of robotics equipment safety.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
- He needed to test something with the power on
- He would have had to reboot the robot
- Getting in through the safety gate was hard
- Someone told him it was safe to enter (that the product feed was inactive)
I've been smacked by robots a couple of times, and while the ones we have are simple lift and put robots that don't hit too hard, it still hurts and if it hit you the wrong way could probably do some serious damage. For the reasons why it's happened to me, see above.[FUCK BETA]
Jan. 25, 1979, Ford Motors plant in Flat Rock,
Robert Williams was killed by a robot. The robotics
firm, Unit Handling Systems (Litton Industries) was
sued for wrongful death.
As to whether or not, this was the first, I have no idea
but it might have been the first time a robotics firm was
sued (successfully) for a wrongful death.
I don't know where the author gets off calling the death
of Kenji Urada, the first. "Death by Robot" was already
pretty well known in worker safety circles by the time
of this incident. This, in a few ways, makes it that much
sadder, that much worse.
(S?)he's casually throwing together three separate fields of safety.
Industrial robotics, consumer product safety, and android (Asimovs robots are androids, not just robots) morality.
With respect to the particular incident reported, I suspect the synopsis in the article is as sloppy as the rest of the article.
Did the engineer really violate safety? Did his boss or the Japanese work ethic give him a choice? Google karoshi and guolaosi.
If an engineer violates safety procedures and gets killed, publish his experience at the next safety meeting.
Too f---ing bad. I will not cry for a guy that violates safety procedure and gets hurt. For his family, sure--it's not their fault Dad is an idiot.
And if it was karoshi, then the hazard the employee was exposed to was the work culture. Compensation for families of karoshi victims is available today (but not in 1981)
There are safety standards used to protect people from robots, and they work, but you have to follow them.
Lockout/Tagout (really lockout; nobody uses tagout anymore)
Avoidance of exposure--passive perimeter guarding (fences); active perimeter guarding (light screens, LASER fences, floor mats, etc.)
Operator load interlocks--when the operator has to load a robot, you design so that only one (operator/robot) can be in the load station at a time.
- I can give you a light screen around the robot and you can jumper it out.
- I can build you a safety fence and you can climb over it.
- I can put a roof over the safety fence (yes, it's been done!) and you'll just unbold one of the fence sections.
- I can give you a teach pendant with a deadman switch (sorry, "active motion enable device"), and you can hand it to the electrician while you ride the robot.
If you're determined to kill yourself, I can't stop you.And if you do, your recent co-workers will all grimace when we see the pictures in next week's safety meeting.
But we won't have any sympathy for you.
This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behaviour was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction writer.
That's not what the 3 laws are about. The three laws are moral values, not machine code.
They have nothing to do with protecting a person from a machine and everything to do with implementing morality in a created race of sentient beings.
If you haven't read Asimov's robot stories, you should know that most of them revolve around the unexpected consequences of the three laws and the danger of rigid legalistic interpretation of moral codes.
Finally, you gotta love this one People are going to be having sex with robots in the next five years.
Author needs to work on his verb tense. That is better handled by consumer product safety procedure, not industrial robot safety protocols.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick