No sex please, robot, just clean the floor
By Ed Habershon and Richard Woods (Sunday Times)
Updated: 2006-06-21 15:09 The race is on to keep humans one step ahead of
robots: an international team of  scientists and academics is to publish a "code of ethics" for machines
as they become more and more sophisticated.
Although
the nightmare vision of a Terminator world controlled by machines may
seem fanciful, scientists believe the boundaries for human-robot interaction must be set
now-before super-intelligent robots develop beyond our control.
"There are two levels of priority," said Gianmarco Verruggio, a roboticist at
the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, northern Italy,
and chief architect of the guide, to be published next month. "We have to manage
the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside
the robots."
Verruggio and his colleagues have identified key areas that include: ensuring
human control of robots; preventing illegal use; protecting data acquired by
robots; and establishing clear identification and traceability of the machines.
"cientists must start analysing these kinds of questions and seeing if
laws or regulations are needed to protect the citizen,"said Verruggio. "Robots will
develop strong intelligence, and in some ways it will be better than human
intelligence.
"But it will be alien intelligence; I would prefer to give priority to
humans."
The analysis culminated at a meeting recently held in Genoa by the European
Robotics Research Network (Euron) that examined the problems likely to arise as
robots become smarter, faster, stronger and ubiquitous.
"Security, safety and sex are the big concerns," said Henrik Christensen, a
member of the Euron ethics group. How far should robots be allowed to influence
people's lives? How can accidents be avoided? Can deliberate harm be prevented?
And what happens if robots turn out to be sexy? "The question is what authority
are we going to delegate to these machines?" said Professor Ronald Arkin, a
roboticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. "Are we, for
example, going to give robots the ability to execute lethal force, or any force,
like crowd control?" The forthcoming code is a sign of reality finally catching
up with science fiction. Ethical problems involving machines were predicted in
the 1950s by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov whose book I, Robot was
recently turned into a Hollywood film. The Terminator and Robocop series of
films also portrayed mechanical law enforcers running amok.
Present robots perform more mundane tasks: the most common consumer robots in
Britain include self-guided vacuum cleaners such as the Scooba, lawnmowers such
as the Robomow and childrenĄ¯s toys such as Robosapien.
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