Standards for Rescue Robots

More than three dozen rescue robots were gathered at a testing site in Disaster City, Texas. The rescue robot exercise was held by The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to help develop a standard suite of performance tests for evaluating mechanical rescuers. The Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorite sponsored this exercise at a testing facility that offers an airstrip, lakes, train wrecks and rubble piles. Establishing a standard for rescue robots is necessary to evaluate one model against others. Read the full story titled, "Rescue Robot Exercise Brings Together Robots, Developers, First Responders" at ScienceDaily.

Could Robots Take Over the World?

From the St. Petersburg Times by Ben Montgomery

"It feels a bit like the End Times these days, what with assault rifles flying off the shelves and the markets swinging and the honeybees dying and the national deficit growing and the polar ice caps melting and wars raging and the missionaries from the panhandle cults filling our mailboxes with doomsday lit. ..." continue at St. Pete Times

Story quotes Wendell: "Robots and computer systems are all over the place and making all kinds of decisions," Wallach says on the phone. "And the machines are getting more and more autonomous."

The Telegraph follows up on military angle

The British newspaper The Daily Telegraph is running a story by reporter Tim Shipman under the headline "Pentagon hires British scientist to help build robot soliders that 'won't commit war crimes'" which greatly exaggerates my role as an external consultant for a Navy-sponsored report. The authors of the report ("Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design", award no. N00014‐07‐1‐1152) are in fact Patrick Lin (who is also co-editor of a 2007 volume on nanotechnology ethics), George Bekey, and Keith Abney.

Despite misrepresenting my role on the project, and my having a few minor factual quibbles, Shipmans' story successfully captures why we need to be thinking about these ethical issues now.

Service Robots for the Home Being Developed in the US

There has been a great deal of discussion regarding Japanese and European robotic research directed at caring for the homebound. However, researchers in the U.S. are also tackling this challenge. At the University of Massachusetts, MIT, and at Georgia Tech roboticists are building service robots. E.J. Mundell discusses these initiatives in an November 18th BusinessWeek article titled, "Robots may come to Aging Boomers' Rescue."

The uBOT-5, being developed by a team in the Laboratory for Perpetual Robotics at UMass monitors the home environment and performs a few simple tasks. With a video screen mounted on Segway-like wheels, the robot can move around the house, and allow distant relatives or doctors to have virtual visits with the homebound. At MIT a team lead by Nichols Roy is building an "autonomous wheelchair" that requires only a voice command to travel to another place in a home or hospital. Service dogs are the prototypes for the home-care robots being created by Charlie Kemp at Georgia Tech. Opening drawers and working light switches are among the tasks performed by these service-pets.

Given a predicted shortage of 800,000 nurses and home health-care aides by 2020, there is expected to be high demand for robotic caregivers by aging boomers.

NYT Article Discusses Ethics for Battlefield Robots

Ronald Arkin's contention that intelligent battlefield robots can behave more ethically than human soldiers is discussed in a New York Times article titled. "A Soldier, Taking Orders From Its Ethical Judgment Center." In addition to Arkin's research at Georgia Tech, the article quotes Colin Allen, Daniel Dennett, Noel Sharkey, and mentions the publication of "Moral Machines."

Rude Robots

"You can endow a robot with a personality . . . but it should not be rude," says Maja Matarić , the founding director of the center for Robotics and Embedded Systems at USC. Matarić is particularly concerned with insolence from service robots that play a role in assisted living, as health coaches, and in care for the elderly. Adam Shah reports on Matarić's interest in developing social robots sensitive to appropriate behavior in a PCWorld news article, "Rude Robots, Stay Away From Homes."

For the record...

It is exciting to see a book on Machine Ethics, a topic that is certainly important. While we appreciate the fact that the authors have acknowledged our research in this field, we were dismayed that our work was misrepresented. The authors committed the fallacy of equivocation in dismissing Susan's view on p. 97. The word "principles" changes meaning from one sentence to the next in refuting her position in just two sentences. Of course Beauchamp and Childress's "Principles" of Biomedical Ethics can "lead to conflicting recommendations for action." This is why they are put forth as prima facie duties/principles, rather than absolute duties/principles. What is needed is some decision principle(s) that determine which duty becomes strongest in each of such cases of conflict. Susan maintains that, at this time, there is general agreement among bioethicists as to the right action in many particular ethical dilemmas (e.g. that the principle/duty of Respect for Autonomy should dominate in a case where a competent adult rejects a treatment that could have benefitted him, wheras the principles/duties of Non-Maleficence and Beneficence become stronger than Respect for Autonomy when dealing with an incompetent patient). If there is not agreement on at least some cases, then there is no ethics to be programmed into, or learned by, a machine. The Machine Ethics project could not even get started.

Susan believes, furthermore, that ethicists are reaching agreement on more and more cases of particular ethical dilemmas as the issues are more fully understood and appreciated. From these cases, some decision principles can be gleaned. In other cases, where a disagreement remains (at least for the time being) the prima facie duty approach can reveal the nature of the disagreement. (One would put more weight on one duty, while another puts more weight on a different duty.) We have consistently maintained that it is unwise to allow a machine to interact with humans in areas where there is no agreement as to which action is ethically correct.

In the extended discussion of MedEthEx the details, unfortunately, were either incorrect or stated in a confused way. To give just two examples: The authors are incorrect in stating that MedEthEx adopts Ross's prima facie duties. Instead, we used Beauchamp and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics, one of which (Respect for Autonomy) was never one of Ross's duties. On p. 127, it is stated that "MedEthEx uses an inductive logic system based on the Prolog programming language...." Instead, the machine learning technique of Inductive Logic Programming is used which is not tied to any particular programming language.

Finally, the authors seem to not fully understand our current approach, which is where our previous work has been heading all along, an approach that is far from a "top-down" in that we assume no particular features of ethical dilemmas, or particular ethical duties.