If the first thing that pops into your head when you read the title Robot Ethics is science fiction writer Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics,
then you're like many of the rest of us. The Laws were a storytelling
device that Asimov adopted so he could write stories exploring the
possible consequences of having non-evil robots share living space with
humans — at a time when any real hope of such a thing was decades off,
at least. We may now be on the verge of the real thing, from Roombas
to caretaker robots looking after children and the elderly in Japan.
And if there's one thing we know it's that there isn't any realistic way
of turning Asimov's laws into functioning computer code. In fact, a lot
of the things we'd like robots to be able to do reliably — such as
respond proportionately when it's deployed in a war zone — are simply
not things we have any idea how to code. Robot Ethics
considers this sort of problem, as well as issues regarding robot
lovers (Blay Whitby) and prostitutes (David Levy), humans' ability to
fall into emotional dependence upon even the most machine-like of
machines (Matthias Scheutz), robot caregivers and the ethical issues
they pose (Jason Borenstein and Amanda Sharkey), whether there can be
such a thing as a "moral machine" (Anthony F. Beavers), and the problem
that comes up so often among optimistically futurist roboticists of
whether at some point robots will deserve human rights (Colin Allen and
Wendell Wallach).
I have to give these authors credit here: they are not just
speculating about whether robots can become real people, but considering
problems of liability. That's a good thing, because this is
traditionally the point at which my inner biological supremacist asserts
itself: who cares whether robots should have rights? Let's focus on the
maltreatment so many humans have to live through first, OK? More
practically, that sort of problem is a distraction from the very real
opportunities that robots will present for invading their owners'
privacy, as Ryan Calo argues in his chapter, 'Robots and privacy'; your
"plastic pal who's fun to be with" is going to collect an amazing amount
of data about you just in the ordinary course of organising your life —
data that our increasingly surveillance-happy societies will surely be
interested in.
"Probably the biggest moral conundrum posed by robots is the human propensity for anthropomorphising."
In the end, probably the biggest moral conundrum posed by robots is
the human propensity for anthropomorphising: some (how many?) people
treat their Roombas like family pets — and a robot could hardly be
dumber than a Roomba. A smart robot designed to simulate real emotional
response is infinitely more dangerous in terms of suckering us into
cuddling up to it and telling it our innermost secrets. If some of the
worst scenarios imagined in this book ever come to pass, it may be like
the whale in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, seeing the
ground rushing toward it at high speed, asked optimistically, "I wonder
if it will be friends with me?" That would be us, cast as the whale.
Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics Edited by Patrick Lin, Keith Abeney and George A. Bekey MIT Press 386 pages ISBN: 978-0-262-01666-7 Price £31.95, $45
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