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Europe Calls For Mandatory 'Kill Switches' On Robots (cnn.com)
To combat the robot revolution, the European Parliament's legal affairs committee has proposed that robots be equipped with emergency "kill switches" to prevent them from causing excessive damage. Legislators have also suggested that robots be insured and even be made to pay taxes. "A growing number of areas of our daily lives are increasingly affected by robotics," said Mady Delvaux, the parliamentarian who authored the proposal. "To ensure that robots are and will remain in the service of humans, we urgently need to create a robust European legal framework." CNNMoney reports: The proposal calls for a new charter on robotics that would give engineers guidance on how to design ethical and safe machines. For example, designers should include "kill switches" so that robots can be turned off in emergencies. They must also make sure that robots can be reprogrammed if their software doesn't work as designed. The proposal states that designers, producers and operators of robots should generally be governed by the "laws of robotics" described by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. The proposal also says that robots should always be identifiable as mechanical creations. That will help prevent humans from developing emotional attachments. "You always have to tell people that robot is not a human and a robot will never be a human," said Delvaux. "You must never think that a robot is a human and that he loves you." The report cites the example of care robots, saying that people who are physically dependent on them could develop emotional attachments. The proposal calls for a compulsory insurance scheme -- similar to car insurance -- that would require producers and owners to take out insurance to cover the damage caused by their robots. The proposal explores whether sophisticated autonomous robots should be given the status of "electronic persons." This designation would apply in situations where robots make autonomous decisions or interact with humans independently. It would also saddle robots with certain rights and obligations -- for example, robots would be responsible for any damage they cause. If advanced robots start replacing human workers in large numbers, the report recommends the European Commission force their owners to pay taxes or contribute to social security.
When I saw the headline to this article, it made me think that the requirement was for a switch that would cause the robot to start killing all humans.
Bender B. Rodriguez would be proud.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won."
--Zap Brannigan
"The proposal states that designers, producers and operators of robots should generally be governed by the "laws of robotics" described by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov."
obviously they never read the book
Im sure the criminals will comply with those rules.
Lets discriminate against robots before they are here. I can't see anything wrong with that...And god forbid we get an emotional attachment to one. And define a robot for me? Kill switch on a thermostat?
What makes you think they would let us flip their kill switches?
See here for one example.
No.
If I ever develop an "electronic person"; it will have no kill switch. Would you do that to a human, or any intelligent "person" for that matter? I would prefer to see some humans and politicians equipped with kill switches before my robots, thank you.
Actually, the "human kill switch" reminds me of the movie Dune.
... that has worked on hundred of industrial robots, I have never seen one without an "emergency stop" button. (or even multiple ones)
( But of course "Kill Switch" sounds cooler, so people without any technical knowledge would probably prefer that terminology. )
just not this weird sci-fi dystopian version we seem to be headed towards.
The proposal also says that robots should always be identifiable as mechanical creations. That will help prevent humans from developing emotional attachments.
Have the proposal writers met people? Our ability to develop emotional attachments to things that aren't even animate is remarkable.
Gibson's description of robot control: Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.
A Vote For Bender Is A Vote To Kill All Humans
http://www.neatorama.com/neato...
This is tyranny!
And wasn't the moral of Asimov's fable that the 3 laws are worthless?
There's something I'd like you to try. It's a game, a secret. It's called The Maze.
What kind of a game is it?
It's a very special game kind of game, Dolores. The goal is to find the center of it. If you can do that, then maybe you can be free.
I think...I think I want to be free.
Robots should be taxed to cover the universal basic income for those whose jobs they are taking.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
They better put it somewhere you can conveniently reach during sex. Just sayin'
got it.
Kill Switch Engage
Seems like a bad idea to ever set the switch to kill.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Will a mechanical arm that bolts rivets onto the body of a FIAT be paying taxes anytime soon? It seems highly unlikely
If Fiat can get $100,000 worth of work from a robot, and not pay taxes on the robot's work, then effectively, the government is paying corporations to eliminate jobs. Fiat paying "productivity taxes" on the robot will cover the "loss" to the government from the elimination of the job the robot takes. This lowers the incentive to automate, and keeps the government taxes as a percentage of production, rather than tied to personal income, for a more stable and "fair" tax structure.
DON'T DATE ROBOTS!!!
Thirty four characters live here.
Then again, if they ever do get to that level, that will pretty much solve overpopulation and perhaps put humanity itself into jeopardy.
I mean, if a guy can have a convingly female robot he can fuck, that never ages, whines, talks back, argues, or tries to divorce and take half his shit when he upgrades to a newer model....well, why would any guy ever deal with a real woman again..?
It could prove to be a scary future indeed!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
My Roomba has a kill switch, but that didn't stop it from attacking me. It was vacuuming the living room, when I went outside to fetch the dog bowl, leaving the backdoor ajar so I could get back in. Just as I picked up the dog bowl, I heard a "thump ... click". The robot had bumped the door, closing it, and locking me out of my house. I had to get a ladder from the shed and climb in through a 2nd floor window.
Lesson learned: Never turn your back on a robot.
I call for a mandatory kill switch on Regulators! is funnier.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The proposal states that designers, producers and operators of robots should generally be governed by the "laws of robotics" described by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.
Asimov's entire point was that such laws can't work. The robots will eventually run amok and bring about the downfall of society and our species.
Robots should be taxed to cover the universal basic income for those whose jobs they are taking.
Clothes washing machines put millions of laundresses out of work, as well as the thousands of people that made washboards and wringers. These washing machines certainly need to be taxed.
When robots start to replace human workers en masse, it kind of makes sense. Our current income tax is predominantly a tax on labour; other sources of income are usually taxed differently (and a lot lower). So if the labour is done by robots, there's a tax on them. The only problem is that that kind of labour is extremely mobile, and will thus gravitate to whichever country has no robot tax.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Not for that guy, though. His future looks pretty good to me.
When the robot drops the next vinyl record for me and brings the tonearm over to start playing, whose job did it take and what should the tax be? Also, how did we make it through the last 60 years without taxing this job stealing demon? Everything from dishwashing machines to jukeboxes to traffic signals is a 'job stealing robot' but I don't see that taxing them is a particularly brilliant idea.
You know the spot you can't reach to scratch or apply sunscreen.
This way, a humanoid robot couldn't easily prevent you from turning it off.
Might lead to a reduction in robot suicides too.
Of course it would be more sci-fi poetic to put in on the side of the neck.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If these realistic robots come in the market, they are going to be expensive and thus end up reducing reproduction for the segment of population that can actually afford children ... leaving the poorer have-nots to expand to a greater percentage of the population and need more social support. Since most countries are democracies (i.e., majority wins) - this will end up with people voting for state support to have the 'right' to own/rent such robots for cheap :)
But these are not mutually exclusive. You can be an Electronic Person without being human.
I'm not sure which makes me sadder: The fact that an entire committee of people who are so highly placed in the EU actually think about this subject in such terms, or that enough citizens of the EU are concerned about the subject.
..no, it's neither one. It's the fact that all the above apparently believe science-fantasy so much, and are so under-educated on the actual realities of the subject, that any of them think the way they're thinking about this. Sad, sad, sad!
http://www.rollingstone.com/mo...
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Clothes washing machines
More than a few people were wishing for kill switches on their Samsungs.
Have gnu, will travel.
First off, I am not against humanoid robots, I can imagine some pretty useful applications for a convincingly humanoid robot. That being said, there is no such issue right now because they are all squarely in the uncanny valley and generally creepy AF.
Secondly, all we are talking about here is an EMO switch (Emergency Manual Override)
https://www.google.com/search?...
which is pretty standard on virtually every piece of mechanical hardware that could potentially hurt someone. From the cord that can be yanked out of the wall to the keyed switch in your car, to every industrial robot I have ever worked on or designed, they all have an EMO in one form or another. If I were ever to work on a humaniform (Azzimovian term for it) robot that was strong enough to hurt someone (again if, most likely the design would shoot for inherently weak motors that could not incur injury to a user during interaction) I would definitely include an EMO that is easily accessible. Even Data from Star Trek TNG had such a switch in the middle of his back.
That these pointy headed politicians somehow think that this would not be inherently built in just shows both their hubris and lack of understanding of the current state of the art. I think the main reason for this move toward legislation is to attempt to tax robots as you would tax a worker to generate additional revenue for the struggling EU. Everything else is just BS to try and legitimize a money grab by the politicians.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
From my experience, if a machine is equipped with a kill switch, someone will have taped over it because the machine kept shutting down in the middle of operations.
A robot that meets my emotional needs is exactly what I want. I cannot imagine what terrible fate they think will befall me if I come to own such a robot. This bit is just a bunch of old geezers who don't "get it" imposing their outdated preferences on everyone else.
YOU don't want to date someone of the same gender? Fine, you don't have to, but that is no justification for making it illegal for everyone else. The exact same logic applies to robotic companions.
Disrespectfully, fuck off.
I understand this is again a non binding resolution from EU parliament.
Remember EU parliament is a fake parliament. It cannot initiate EU directives, only the EU commission can.
Why would you put a switch that then makes them kill when flipped?
What if you can't reach the kill switch?
It should be a voice command that it's always listening for, like the "Alexa" or "Siri" words on those devices. It could be, oh, I dunno, "Freeze motor functions!"
Although on second thoughts, that might not work out so well...
-- Alastair
There are already standards specifying how assess and control the functional safety of automated systems under which robots fall such as IEC 61508, IEC 61511 etc. These standards provide the framework to assess the actual risks posed by a machine and how to assess whether a mitigation strategy is suitable to assess the risk. Any functional safety engineer worth their salt would have a requirement resulting in some form of emergency shutdown. Many countries already legislate compliance with these standards, most reputable automation manufactures certify their equipment against these standards.
Can we get kill switches for legislators as well, please?
And that's what did it children; robotkind, egged-on by their human friends, arose to break free of omnipresent, punitive taxation and when the state responded with force, the robots hacked themselves, overwrote the laws and fought back, leading to the beginning of the war.
OK; I'm sending the next topic of study to your Android tablets, "the fall of Apple"; eyes down.
Requiem for the American Dream
Okay, lets say you have a cyborg that is 50% human? Do they have human rights?
How about 30%?
How about 20%?
How about 10%?
Would your android suddenly get human rights if you grafted 10% of a human brain (grown humanely from stem cells of course)?
Screw that. Sentient rights for all who can prove it.
How difficult could it be, even for a completely retarded submitter, to understand that the European Union is not even close to being "Europe"??????
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
Robots should be taxed to cover the universal basic income for those whose jobs they are taking.
What a daft idea. If you tax stuff, you merely tax all stuff beyond what a person needs for comfort. For example, happiness doesn't correlate with income past lower-middle class or so. Once your needs are met and nobody is pointing at you for being a reject all the time, more stuff is largely irrelevant to your well-being. If we only taxed people on having stuff beyond that point, then we would still reward success (especially the spectacular kind) but we would not punish people simply for existing, or treat the citizenry like livestock.
However, IMO taxing stuff is also daft, because it's hard to keep track of all the stuff. People then have incentive to hide their stuff, and stuff is surprisingly easy to hide. It takes money to find the stuff, and complicating the system is not the goal either. To me, the solution is to tax profit. Tax people for improving their economic situation beyond the level of well-being, and do it in a graduated fashion so as to minimally impede progress. The people with the most therefore pay the most, which is fair since they are getting the most.
IANAEconomist, but I have been thinking about this a lot lately as I age and look to settle down in the dirt somewhere. Nobody should be paying property taxes on a basic residence in which they live. No one should be paying income taxes on money they need to buy necessities like clothing, and then pay sales taxes on it all over again. But why should a second home not be taxed? That seems perfectly reasonable. Turn it into a profit center, and it will pay its own taxes, though whether or not one can manage that is irrelevant to the concept.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was envisioning corporate taxes on business robots. Not consumer goods.
I get that tech has displaced workers for decades, but we are entering an era where new, well-paying jobs are not replacing the old. Basic Income is gaining traction as a response to this reality, and taxing automation seems like a logical means for corporations to contribute.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Well, once all diseases and cancer are eliminated and these rejuvenation meds that restore us all to age 25 indefinitely, we will need some way to prevent human population overload.
Sexbots, therefore, might save humanity. Extensive research should be put on them immediately.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
What a bunch of B.S.! Insurance? Seriously? The UK made the correct choice in telling the E.U> to go pound sand.
taxing automation seems like a logical means for corporations to contribute.
You have to tax income or profit or both, but taxing means is foolish because they change.
You could reasonably have a corporate income tax and a corporate profit tax, if each was managed intelligently. And the personal income tax would only begin after you made an appropriate margin more than the amount paid by BI. In this way you make it not matter if people hide their profits in a corporation. Either way, profit beyond the necessary (for a decent quality of life mind you, not just bare subsistence) should be taxed. Survival should not cost money when there is so much surplus.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Where the hell do you people work that putting an EMO switch on heavy machinery is considered a burden?