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South Korea Drafting Ethical Code for Robotic Age
goldaryn writes "The BBC is reporting that the South Korean government is working on an ethical code for human/robot relations, 'to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa'. The article describes the creation of the Robot Ethics Charter, which 'will cover standards for users and manufacturers and will be released later in 2007. [...] It is being put together by a five member team of experts that includes futurists and a science fiction writer.'"
Because one thing's quite blatantly clear, robots are by their very definition slaves. They are owned, they exist to do work we don't want to do (or which is hazardous), they don't get paid and they are only given what's needed for their sustainance, they can't own property etc.
I fear the day when we create the first truely sentient robot. Because then we will have to deal with that very question: Does a robot have rights? Can he make a decision?
And I'd be very careful how to word the charta. We have seen that the "three laws" ain't safe.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's anthropomorphizm run amuck!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I dunno, how about actual workable laws? Have you ever read I Robot? The stories are about the failings of these three laws. And Asimov himself has said that he never intended them to be anything more than a literary device ("shaggy dog stories" I believe is the term he used).
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
If we're creating laws about how humans and robots should treat each other, shouldn't the robots be part of the decision-making process? This sounds a little too much like "the founding fathers" determining what rights slaves had (not many at the time).
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make robots without emotions - essentially machines, pistons, actuators, CPUs, etc... and WTF, who cares how much you use it, replace the parts as they wear out like any machine...
why would anyone install emotion into a worker robot anyway?
and even if it had emotion, the only reason to "treat it right" is so they don't start the robot uprising against humanity. which is a good reason... but that begs the question, why give real human emotion to something you want to abuse? for menial labor, keep the emotions out, let it be purely a machine.
this is a waste.
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You assume that we would be capable of building an intelligent system while simultaneously asserting a biased opinion as truth in the agent's knowledge base. At the very least, you're going to have an agent with very distorted perceptions of the world.
The simplest line of reasoning compares it to child abuse. A newborn is marginally sentient, but there are all sorts of protections because it obviously will become sentient. Anybody 'giving birth' to sentient programs would be forced, in the face of reasonable legal practice, to tread lightly. Will people do evil things? Yes. Will those things be accepted by society at large? No. It will mirror todays problems.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
From my experience, a severely fucked-up worldviews are no obstacle to being a normal human:
Sadists, racists, sexists, "illegal"-immigran-ists, extreme liberals/conservatives (commies/nazis) can all nonetheless be very cogent.
Does that make them less important?
More importantly... what does this have to do with whether or not ethics should be applied to non-human intelligence? If the reason that a human, a dog, a tree, and a rock have different 'levels' of rights is their different levels intelligence, than why would some (non-human) with roughly equal (or even higher) level of intelligence have a different set of rights?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Do you believe in the human soul?
Robots won't have souls even if they have AI. Abusing a robot will be like abusing a car -- stupid and expensive, but not cause for punishment or new laws.
Does anyone else not think it's funny they got a Science FICTION writer to help them? Emphasizing the word FICTION...
"Last year a UK government study predicted that in the next 50 years robots could demand the same rights as human beings". LOL
Formatted.... Sorry. :(
A couple of the replies I've ready through have taken a very "it's not biological, so it's not sentient/concious/etc" attitude towards all this. Firstly, I'd like to ask "what defines something as concious/sentient?" Is it ability to react with an enviroment? An understanding of self? We can't even agree on what is true artificial intelligence let alone; what is considered artificial emotion (and to some, they're one in the same).
But just to entertain the idea: I would like for some of those people who are standing on the side of "they'll never be like us" to consider this...
Say we took a human; something we can all agree is both sentient and concious. At what point through modification (be it anything from something as simple as a hearing aids and eyeglasses to neurological implants and cybernetics) is the human no longer sentient or concious? Because the chassis started from a carbon as opposed to silicon, that makes it a true entity?
We are less then a decade (if we're not already in the entrance) of the nanotechnology and biological engineering revolution. Theoretically, our immunizations as a child could be a single syringe filled with nanomachines that act as white blood cells. Vaccinations would be obsolute because we wouldn't have to weaken the virus for them to fight it. As we slept, we could have modules on our night stands that connect to a hospotals servers and do a full "system" check on us. They could upload any information about possible virus strains and after a "course of action" was determined to fight it, you would get an email (or whatever notification) saying that there is an update avaliable and to visit your local hospital or clinic (for security reasons, the bedside module won't be able to make changes to your nanomachines). After walking through a metal detector that updates your nanomachines; you're out, on your way and immunized against all the diseases that could afflict you (or biological warfare outbreaks - which... when the technology first comes out would more then likely be the main motivator for everyone to upgrade. It got us using RFIDs, right? But that's another debate about a different topic).
Now apply that scenario to the question I posed earlier. Which is just one example of how we could be more inegrated into a system.
We are uncomfortable saying a machine could be sentient, but much more uncomfortable saying we could be less.