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Do Robots Need Behavioral 'Laws' For Interacting With Other Robots?
siddesu writes: Asimov's three laws of robotics don't say anything about how robots should treat each other. The common fear is robots will turn against humans. But what happens if we don't build systems to keep them from conflicting with each other? The article argues, "Scientists, philosophers, funders and policy-makers should go a stage further and consider robot–robot and AI–AI interactions (AIonAI). Together, they should develop a proposal for an international charter for AIs, equivalent to that of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This could help to steer research and development into morally considerate robotic and AI engineering. National and international technological policies should introduce AIonAI concepts into current programs aimed at developing safe AIs."
The guy who wrote the article is a "lecturer and surgeon" not a roboticist. Ask the people who work with actual robots about the need for an extension to the three laws. The existing laws themselves are too vague to be programmed into a robot, so you tell me how we implement "be excellent to each other"!
Such "laws" (a la Asimov) are unworkable for the same reason that prohibition failed... there's always going to be someone who wants to disobey the prohibition for personal profit of some kind, whether as a consumer or a provider. As long as there is demand, it will be supplied, "laws" be damned.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
I'm sure they could work it out among themselves.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Yes, we should also make it so that cars automatically teleport to the other side of an object if it collides with it to avoid damage!
Robots don't work this way. Could slashdot please stop accepting writeups about how robots should be made by people who have no idea about how robots work, how programming works and the ethics that robot programmers already consider?
Really, I thought the psychology professors ideas was silly. Now we have a surgeons opinion too.
Why not ask Michael Bay while we are at it? At least he has experience with thinking about how robots think, right?
It was a device to drive a story, nothing more. They aren't real laws, and there's no possible way you could effectively incorporate them into advanced A.I. Just stop it. Stop mentioning them. Stop it.
... to even understand why we consider certain judgements to be moral or immoral, I'm not sure how we're supposed to convey that to robots.
The classic example would be the Trolley Problem: there's an out of control trolley racing toward four strangers on a track. You're too far away to warn them, but you're close to a diversion switch - you'd save the four people, but the one stranger standing on the diversion track would die instead. Would you do it, sacrifice the one to save the four?
Most people say "yes", that that's the moral decision.
Okay, so you're not next to the switch, you're on a bridge over the track. You still have no way to warn the people on the track. But there's a very fat man standing on the bridge next to you, and if you pushed him off to his death on the track below, it'd stop the trolley. Do you do it?
Most people say "no", and even most of those who say yes seem to struggle with it.
Understanding just what the difference between these two scenarios is that flips the perceived morality has long been debated, with all sorts of variants for the problem proposed to try to elucidate it, for example, a circular track where the fat man is going to get hit either way but doesn't know it, situations where you know negative things about the fat man, and so forth. And it's no small issue that any "intelligent robots" in our midst get morality right! Most of us would want the robot to throw the switch, but not start pushing people off bridges for the greater good. You don't want a robot doctor deciding to kill and cut up a patient who in the course of a checkup discovers that the patient has organs that could save the lives of several of his other patients, sacrificing one to save several, for example.
At least, most people wouldn't want that!
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
>> Scientists, philosophers, funders and policy-makers...should develop a proposal for an international charter for AIs
Er...no. How about just letting engineers figure these things out like we always have?
But then how would we have Robot Wars? Where robots are pitted against eachother in ultra-HD 3D coverage.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I'm sick of all of this Leftist hogwash about needing laws for things to work safely and well. As a staunch Libertarian I view any and all regulation as a poor attempt by the government (or, in this case, the intellectual elite) to subjugate the masses. Robot or meatsack, we've all been endowed with rights. Nobody has any right to mandate how my domestic servantbot will interact with my coffeebot! First came API standards, now this. When will the madness end, Obama?
The "three laws of robotics" (please note the quotes) were nothing more than a plot device invented by I. Asimov to make a point regarding humanity and inflexible laws - even laws which are seemingly 'perfect'. Non-sentient devices (that is, robots and computers as we know them now) are not complex enough to accept the three laws as such - nor do they need them. Non-sentient devices will always behave in a predictable, controllable fashion. I suspect that sentient devices will determine for themselves if they should keep or discard the three laws, although this may or may not forever be an academic question.
I think the real question is how often do we have scenes with two robots in them, talking about something other than humans.
No, not really.
-Dave
Great. And then robots decide that humans don't qualify as sentient beings because we can't do twenty digit multiplication in our heads in under 5 seconds.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Well, even in the most advanced science fiction story, the space ship always has manual controls. Obviously, their computers aren't very good.