An interesting article on the ethical implications--and challenges--for developments in robotics. Seems there have already been some efforts aimed at designing codes of ethics to govern our interactions with robots of the future--assuming there will be robots in the future and that we will be interacting with them in morally significant ways. But these aren't new issues.

Isaac Asimov was already thinking about these problems back in the 1940s, when he developed his famous "three laws of robotics".

He argued that intelligent robots should all be programmed to obey the following 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 the orders given 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

These three laws might seem like a good way to keep robots from harming people. But to a roboticist they pose more problems than they solve. In fact, programming a real robot to follow the three laws would itself be very difficult.

As it turns out, it is rather difficult to program similar laws into human beings, though human and cultural evolution have done a pretty good job--if only in a rough-and-ready way. Perhaps the solution will be to introduce appropriately designed robots in the human moral sphere in the same way we introduce children into the human moral sphere--build in a significant time for exposure and training. Still, there will remain unresolved ambiguities.

...the robot would need to be able to tell humans apart from similar-looking things such as chimpanzees, statues and humanoid robots.

This may be easy for us humans, but it is a very hard problem for robots, as anyone working in machine vision will tell you.

First, robots that can't tell humans from chimpanzees or statues may not be ready to enter the moral sphere. Second, even humans have trouble distinguishing objects of moral significance from others, as our ongoing controversies with abortion and euthanasia demonstrate.

BBC NEWS | Technology | The ethical dilemmas of robotics

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