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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.
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"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.The evil monkey commands you to dance.
The robot didn't actively kill him; it just wasn't programmed to know whether a person is there or not. It's like stepping into a giant blender without turning it off. There's isn't much morality to worry about.
Whenever robots come out, why do people trot out Asimov's Laws of Robotics like they're holy writ? He created those laws and then wrote a book's worth of short stories (read: FICTION) showing their pitfalls.
For anyone who thinks they're a great idea, I'd also like to see your working prototype code and design docs.
...am for guidelines to govern the actions of our new robot overlords.
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.
To adhere to Asimov's rules of robotics requires that the robot be capable of executing those instructions, and we're nowhere near having machines with the Artifical Intelligence necessary to do that.
Manufacturing robots are sophisticated, but they're really more properly thought of as "Automatons" in this context, not robots in the Asmovian sense.
Tragic that this fellow died, but no more of a failing than a farmhand who falls into a thresher.
It does suggest that these industrial machines might have more safeties on them than they currently do, though.
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.
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Robots already have a degree of self awareness. Position sensors, battery charge monitors, etc are all designed to let a robot know about itself in relation to the world. As we develop more sophisticated robots, they will require a greater degree of self awareness. Right now, industrial robots are basically programmed at the "goto position x1,y1,z1; close gripper; goto position x2,y2,z2; release gripper;" level. If you want them to work at the "Pick up part X from conveyor belt; dip part in solvent tank;" level, the robot is going to have to be able to coordinate vision and arm motion. In other words it will have to have a greater degree of self awareness. When you get into higher level stuff (same robot, multiple tasks) the robot will have to keep track of which tool it has, what loads it is capable of manipulating, etc.
In short, the more self aware the robot, the higher the level of abstraction you get in assigning tasks to it.
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I have read about robots for ages and i think that the three laws are a load of crap.
That's the whole point: the three simple rules that Asimov proposes have complex implications - his robot stories are filled with situations where following the laws results in tragedy. So yeah, they're a load of crap, but they're intended to be crap.
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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.