Beyond Asimov’s Laws Tuesday, Jun 30 2009
friendly ai 9:58 pm
Around the world, thinkers in roboethics have realized the obvious — Asimov’s Laws are useless for creating friendly robots or AIs. A recent PhysOrg press release, “Living Safely with Robots, Beyond Asimov’s Laws”, describes the conclusions of a study published in International Journal of Social Robotics on roboethics. The study was a collaboration between Taiwanese and Japanese scientists.
The points made in the press release are similar to those made by the Singularity Institute’s 2004 publicity project, Three Laws Unsafe, which was released in conjunction with I, Robot, starring Will Smith.
Very interesting article. I hope it will spark a lot of discussion.
The article made me really worried because of the following sentence:
“However, a growing number of researchers – as well as the authors of the current study – are leaning toward prohibiting human-based intelligence due to the potential problems and lack of need; after all, the original goal of robotics was to invent useful tools for human use, not to design pseudo-humans.”
Who is this “growing number of researchers” which “are leaning toward prohibiting human-based intelligence” (and thus higher-than-human, I suppose)?
Prohibiting??? … Because lack of need???
If these are recommendations of the “experts” which will be communicated to the politics, than I see no bright future for humanity. Seriously.
I would expect such “recommendations” from various neoluddite or fundamentalist groups, but from the three ethics-”scientists”? Oh man…
If humanity is to survive in the longer term (not even that “longer”) there will be “need” for more than dumb breakfast-serving robots. And “prohibiting” will not do. At least the “scientists” should know it. Sometimes I am very sad about level of the intelligence and foresight of humanity’s “scientists”… And they are the brightest what we have.
On the more practical terms, such an attitude should be shown very wrong on as many grounds and to as many audiences as possible.
Mir
We ain’t gunna let robots do nutin.
let’s build em.\
:)
<3