July 30, 2009
Want responsible robotics? Start with responsible humans
The way humans think about artificial intelligence, and robotics was inspired by Issac Asimov who penned the "Three Laws of Responsible Robotics." In the current issue of journal IEEE Intelligent Systems, two engineers propose alternative laws to rewrite our future with robots.The future they foresee is at once safer, and more realistic.
Even though Asimov thought long and hard about his laws when he wrote them, the authors believe that the he did not intend for engineers to create robots that followed those laws to the letter. In reality, engineers are still struggling to give robots basic vision and language skills. These efforts are hindered in part by our lack of understanding of how these skills are managed in the human brain. We are far from a time when humans may teach robots a moral code and responsibility.
David Woods of Ohio University and his coauthor, Robin Murphy of Texas A&M University, composed three laws that put the responsibility back on humans. They came up with three laws that focus on the human organizations that develop and deploy robots. They looked for ways to ensure high safety standards.
Here are Asimov's original three laws:
* A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
* A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
* A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
And here are the three new laws that Woods and Murphy propose:
* A human may not deploy a robot without the human-robot work system meeting the highest legal and professional standards of safety and ethics.
* A robot must respond to humans as appropriate for their roles.
* A robot must be endowed with sufficient situated autonomy to protect its own existence as long as such protection provides smooth transfer of control which does not conflict with the First and Second Laws.
The new first law assumes the reality that humans deploy robots. The second assumes that robots will have limited ability to understand human orders, and so they will be designed to respond to an appropriate set of orders from a limited number of humans.
The third law is considered the most complex. According to the authors, "robots exist in an open world where you can't predict everything that's going to happen. The robot has to have some autonomy in order to act and react in a real situation. It needs to make decisions to protect itself, but it also needs to transfer control to humans when appropriate. You don't want a robot to drive off a ledge, for instance -- unless a human needs the robot to drive off the ledge. When those situations happen, you need to have smooth transfer of control from the robot to the appropriate human," According to Woods, "The bottom line is, robots need to be responsive and resilient. They have to be able to protect themselves and also smoothly transfer control to humans when necessary.The one thing is missing from the new laws: the romance of Asimov's fiction -- the idea of a perfect, moral robot that sets engineers' hearts fluttering. Our laws are little more realistic, and therefore a little more boring,"
In the journal issue's editorial Jacob Beal of BBN Technologies and Patrick H. Winston, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, point out that "humans are still the "gold standard" of intelligent systems. Although machines have surpassed our capabilities in many particular domains, such as solving calculus problems and finding the shortest routes through graphs, no artificial system even comes close to the breadth, flexibility, and integration of capabilities exhibited by the average human. Even in those domains where we generally regard machines as having attained human equivalent capability, this remains true only so long as we narrowly limit the domain: while a machine can generally solve calculus problems that a human can’t, only a human is capable of sorting out which calculus problems are worth solving, or what a game of chess might reveal about the opponent’s personality."
Posted by rsk at July 30, 2009 09:21 AM