Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Robot Warriors Will Get a Guide To Ethics

Posted by kdawson on from the some-distance-yet-to-the-three-laws dept.

thinker sends in an MSNBC report on the development of ethical guidelines for battlefield robots. The article notes that such robots won't go autonomous for a while yet, and that the guidelines are being drawn up for relatively uncomplicated situations — such as a war zone from which all non-combatents have already fled, so that anybody who shoots at you is a legitimate target. "Smart missiles, rolling robots, and flying drones currently controlled by humans, are being used on the battlefield more every day. But what happens when humans are taken out of the loop, and robots are left to make decisions, like who to kill or what to bomb, on their own? Ronald Arkin, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is in the first stages of developing an 'ethical governor,' a package of software and hardware that tells robots when and what to fire. His book on the subject, Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots, comes out this month."

4 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. Been there, done that by Locke2005 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Three Laws of Robotics from 1942.

    --
    I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
    1. Re:Been there, done that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      No they weren't. The laws were flawed and the only modifications that ever occurred were made in order to fix these flaws and prevent paradoxical situations from occurring. There was never a situation where things went wrong due to someone trying to modify the laws to my knowledge.

      The books and short stories all revolved around dilemmas that, when robots attempted to uphold the laws, caused conflicts or paradoxes often causing the robots' positronic brains to malfunction or shut down. Dilemmas such as choosing the death of one human over the death of another, or choosing between two options, both of which would cause harm to a robot/human.

      The only situations where the laws were modified were in "Little Lost Robots", where the inaction clauses were added, and "Robots and Empire", where Giskard invents the Zeroth Law. Both of these modifications were patches to flaws in the original three laws.

    2. Re:Been there, done that by QuantumG · · Score: 3, Informative

      In fiction it is, yes. In reality it's just an ugly radiation bomb.. it'd cause significant damage to structures.. not to mention pets.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    3. Re:Been there, done that by aaaaaaargh! · · Score: 3, Informative

      Humans aren't actually better at it than robots; humans are notoriously bad at estimating conditional probabilities.

      That's not quite true. Computers cannot estimate conditional probabilities at all, all they currently do is calculate probabilities based on already known probabilities. It's true that humans are bad at this, but that is not what "estimating probabilities" means. If you have a complete and accurate model including all the random variables relevant to a given problem and the initial probability distribution, then of course you can feed a computer with this and let it calculate---but even this is of much too high complexity for a computer, so highly simplifying and often incorrect assumptions have to be made, e.g. that the random variables are independent from each other.

      But the models are made by humans, ideally by statisticians together with domain-sepcific experts. Try to let the computer make the model, and you'll get huge Bayesian networks that spit out tons of garbage....