Ethics for Robots ?

• Two years ago, a military robot used in the South African army killed nine soldiers after a malfunction. Earlier this year, a Swedish factory was fined after a robot machine injured one of the workers (though part of the blame was assigned to the worker). Robots have been found guilty of other smaller offenses such as an incorrectly responding to a request.
• So how do you prevent problems like this from happening? Stop making psychopathic robots, say robot experts.
• “If you build artificial intelligence but don’t think about its moral sense or create a conscious sense that feels regret for doing something wrong, then technically it is a psychopath,” says Josh Hall, a scientist who wrote the book Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of a Machine.
• For years, science fiction author Issac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were regarded as sufficient for robotics enthusiasts. The laws, as first laid out in the short story “Runaround,” were simple: A robot may not injure a human being or allow one to come to harm; a robot must obey orders given by human beings; and a robot must protect its own existence. Each of the laws takes precedence over the ones following it, so that under Asimov’s rules, a robot cannot be ordered to kill a human, and it must obey orders even if that would result in its own destruction.
• But as robots have become more sophisticated and more integrated into human lives, Asimov’s laws are just too simplistic, says Chien Hsun Chen, coauthor of a paper published in the International Journal of Social Robotics last month. The paper has sparked off a discussion among robot experts who say it is time for humans to get to work on these ethical dilemmas.
• Accordingly, robo-ethicists want to develop a set of guidelines that could outline how to punish a robot, decide who regulates them and even create a ”legal machine language” that could help police the next generation of intelligent automated devices.
• Still the efforts to create a robot that can successfully interact with humans over time will likely be incomplete, say experts. “People have been trying to sum up what we mean by moral behavior in humans for thousands of years,” says Hall. “Even if we get guidelines on robo-ethics the size of the federal code it would still fall short. Morality is impossible to write in formal terms.”