Robot Wars

In another post, Noel Sharkey and I have been debating the control or otherwise of robots designed/presumed to care for children. I stand by my mistrust of legislation and top-down guidance on topics like this, preferring education and individual accountability. But when it comes to military robots, Noel and I are on pretty much the same wavelength, so I wanted to make a separate post about that to alert people to the topic and the issues he raises.

When it comes to the use of stupid but autonomous robots for military applications, I agree with Noel in large part. So I suggest you read his IEEE Intelligent Systems magazine article here.

I don’t pretend to know what we can do about this. It’s one of those “if we don’t do it, they will” situations, and those are very dangerous feedback loops that cause people to do things they know to be crazy.

Ironically, if we ever get genuinely intelligent robots, with intelligence on a par with humans, then I’m convinced they’ll qualify as moral beings themselves and the problems will get easier. The currently looming quandaries only apply to stupid automatic systems. We have had stupid automatic weapons for a long time – mines are an obvious example. We don’t even expect these to discriminate between military and innocent targets, but once their behavior becomes more conditional and they are expected to make decisions and believed to be right, a lot of dangers arise.

I do hope people can keep these ideas separate from the general fear of robots, however, since the latter is misguided. We’re not talking robotic warriors of the Hollywood variety here. In fact it’s their complete stupidity that’s the problem.

Ethical rules for robots?

Prof. Noel Sharkey was interviewed in the Independent yesterday, raising concerns about the dangers of children and the elderly being left in the care of robots for too long, thus lacking human contact. The article brings up Asimov’s laws, and although Noel doesn’t advocate programming such rules into the robots themselves, he does think we need an official set of guidelines for the use of robot carers.

I remember having a conversation with Noel about such things in my car once. I don’t think I agree.

It seems like needless scaremongering to me. Yes, one day robots might be useful enough to look after the kids for a while but we really haven’t reached that point yet, despite the hype. Anyone who uses a present-day robot in such a way is self-evidently irresponsible and culpable. Some people think that a packet of candy is capable of looking after their children while they go off partying. Some people think a nursing home can look after granny so that they needn’t be bothered with her any more. But we don’t blame the candy or the nursing home – we rightly blame the culprits. 

We can’t easily legislate for that, any more than we can set guidelines for the safe use of candy. In the case of guns I can see the logic – a gun is exceptionally dangerous, it can be misused very easily and at little risk to its owner, and it is specifically designed for killing. But stupid people will always do stupid things, and we can’t set guidelines for every single item that they might misuse in the process.

Asimov’s laws are a case in point. He had to extend them because he realized they were incomplete and contained dangerous loopholes. It wouldn’t be difficult to find loopholes even in his extended set. The harder you try to legislate, the more loopholes you create. I’m all for reasonable curbs on irresponsibility, but specifying the rules down to the letter just makes people feel that sticking to the letter of the law permits them to flout its spirit (see this astounding article for an example).

I accept that robot carers are DESIGNED to supplement human care, and hence could be misused without much thought. But I think the responsibility for this should be exercised individually, just as it is for other household tools. Any new technology requires acts of responsibility from its creators, its marketers and its consumers. But to call for guidelines now is surely going to cause more trouble than it prevents. Society is full of negative feedback loops – whenever something new comes along, the old adapts to it. Trying to legislate for the new on the assumption that nothing else will change can be a dangerous mistake.

Let’s at least wait until robots are REALLY being used and abused in this way, rather than adding to the already quite hysterical fear of intelligent technology. Otherwise we’ll never gain the benefits because people will be scared off.

More importantly, let us, as researchers, exercise our own intelligence and responsibility, rather than expecting a bunch of lawyers to do it for us. As a case in point, I remember seeing a robot designed to help someone with paraplegia feed himself. But the robot was facing the user, making him into a “patient” and the robot into his “carer”. Being fed by a robot has surely got to be demeaning. All the idiots had to do was turn the thing around so that the robot’s arm was positioned where the human’s arm would have been if he were able-bodied, and he would have been “using a tool to feed himself” instead – a far less insulting prospect. Researchers should think about these things, not rely on legislation to do it for them.

Military robots are quite another matter. When one army can attack another without any risk to its own men or those of its enemy (since we can presume that both sides will eventually have the same robots), then the only human casualties will be innocent bystanders. Somebody needs to be working hard on figuring out the consequences of all this for world peace. But a namby-pamby set of guidelines isn’t going to cut it in this arena.

Incidentally, my position on Asimov’s Laws is that any robot capable of keeping to them must, of necessity, be capable of breaking them. Therefore they are useless. Discuss.

Genesis

Well, bless her little heart. Lucy the robot orangutan captured a lot of people’s interest and she turns up in quite a few popular science books and academic works, but I was recently amused to learn that she also helped inspire a novel!

 

An editor at Quercus in the UK kindly sent me a copy of Genesis, by Bernard Beckett, which they’re publishing next year in several countries. He said I’d be sure to find it interesting, and he was darn right. Not only is it about a strangely familiar-sounding robot orangutan, which was brought up and educated like a child, but it’s also an intriguing philosophical story with some neat twists. I won’t give away the plot, and obviously the robot in question is nowhere near as stupid as Lucy, but it deals with some big questions about man, machine and consciousness in a clever way.

Cool, huh?

Hello, I’m still alive!

Given that there are more than a hundred million blogs out there, it would be rational and modest of me to assume that nobody is ever going to read this one. OTOH I’ve had quite a few emails since I temporarily shut down my Cyberlife Research website, from people asking me what the heck is going on. And before that I had even more emails telling me to get up off my skinny ass and update my blog more often. So maybe somebody will eventually read this message in a bottle. Maybe pigs will fly and the world will be filled with everlasting peace, too.

My site has been down because I (and the people who are dearest to me) have been going through something of a personal upheaval, none of which is your business. As part of all that I now live in the United States instead of England, and so I needed to reorganize my web presence (as well as having to learn to write “reorganize” instead of “reorganise”).

I currently have two AI-related projects on the go: a game called Sim-biosis, to be published by Cyberlife Research, and a humanoid robot called Grace, as part of a new venture called Grandroids. So what Sara, my web programmer wife, is going to be doing over the coming few weeks is reinstate the website at www.cyberlife-research.com as a place in which to keep my archive of old Creatures and Lucy material and set up a new website at www.sim-biosis.com to promote and document my upcoming game. Sara’s also working on www.grandroids.com for our robotics project.

But that left me in a quandary about where to put my personal pages and non-project-related jottings. So I decided to get all “Web 2.0″ about it, join the modern age at long last and start a personal site/blog here at WordPress. The other websites will have “official” project blogs for the game and robot, but I’ll be putting the more personal items about those things here, plus random blogging and all the vanity stuff about what a wonderful person I am.

I hope you’ll drop by now and then, but in the meantime watch out for those low-flying pigs.