Robot Warriors Will Get a Guide To Ethics

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."

Comments

Been there, done that

[Locke2005]

Three Laws of Robotics from 1942.

Re:Been there, done that

[Anonymous Coward]

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.