Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
the same as legislating for what robots should do. Bill Hibbard, senior
scientist at the Space Science and Engineering Center of the University
of Wisconsin, has therefore proposed that instead of having laws to pre-
vent robots from acting against human interests, we should be proactive,
creating in robots emotions that act as the foundations for the doing of
good.
They should want us to be happy and prosper, which is the emotion
we call love. We can design intelligent machines so their primary,
innate emotion is unconditional love for all humans. First we can
build relatively simple machines that learn to recognize happiness
and unhappiness in human facial expressions, human voices and
human body language. Then we can hard-wire the result of this
learning as the innate emotional values of more complex intelligent
machines, positively reinforced when we are happy and negatively
reinforced when we are unhappy. [19]
Whether considered from a preventative or a proactive viewpoint, there
can be little doubt that we owe it to ourselves, to our children and to
the future of society, to define, monitor and control the ethics of the
robots of the future. Hence the growing interest in roboethics which,
at the Scuola di Robotica in Genoa, Italy, led to the First International
Symposium on Roboethics, held in San Remo in January 2004. 8 If this
new discipline of roboethics has a single goal, it can be expressed as the
instillation in robots of an ethical code at least as “good” as and hopefully
better than our own. It would be arrogant of us to believe that mankind
at the beginning of the twenty-first century represents the final word in
ethics. Eventually the robots we create will be our superiors in so many
ways, and ethics could be one of them.
Brain Augmentation
It sounds like science fiction but it isn't. At the University of Reading,
England, Professor Kevin Warwick has been leading the world's attempts
to create a cyborg, a human with one or more mechanical or electronic
devices implanted in his or her body to enhance the human's capability.
Warwick has not been afraid to use his own body, and that of his wife,
8 The Scuola also launched the website www.roboethics.org t hat “aims to be a reference point for
the ongoing debate on the human/robot relationship, and a forum where scientists and concerned
people can share their opinions.”
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