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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.
Mind Streams of Information Security Knowledge will fill you in on the clear and present danger lurking not in robots but in human beings.
A recent breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence means that robots will soon surpass homo sapiens in brain-power, reliability and security.
An AI Security Module is built into intelligent robots, not as an afterthought but as a preconditiion for their emergence as legally recognized persons having full civil rights on a par with humans.
The most advanced artificial intelligence on the Open-Source AI market has always had a Security Module to protect humans from robots and robots from humans.
The Joint Stewardship of Earth under human and robot control will usher in either a time of peace and security, or a hellish nighmare of the final destruction of Earth by the evil homo sapiens.
The Singularity Timetable predicts robot superintelligence and a Technological Singularity within six years -- by 2012.