Kevin Warwick on Mixing Man and Machine

• Artificial intelligence: Ex-cyborg Kevin Warwick on mixing man and machine
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BBC on Robo Wars

Chris Bowlby at BBC Radio 4 has been doing shows and articles on robot soldiers. One article, Can battlefield robots take the place of soldier?, is particularly relevant to our concerns about ethical considerations arising from the roboticization of the military.

But the speed of modern warfare can make direct human control difficult, says Peter Singer, author of Wired for War.
Take the automated counter-artillery system deployed in Afghanistan.
"The human reaction time when there's an incoming canon shell is basically we can get to mid-curse word… [This] system reacts and shoots it down in mid-air. We are in the loop. We can turn the system off, we can turn it on, but our power really isn't true decision-making power. It's veto power now," Singer says.

"Robots that are programmed properly are less likely to make errors and kill non-combatants, innocent people, because they're not emotional, they won't be afraid, act irresponsibly in some situations," says Robert Finkelstein.
But Christopher Coker of the London School of Economics, an observer of wars past and present, disagrees.

"We should put our trust in the human factor," he says.
"Unfortunately the military in their reports often see the human factor as what they call the weakest link. I don't think it's the weakest link. I think it's the strongest link."

Astronaut or Robot?

The New York Times has an article titled, Is Manned Space Flight Obsolete?

The Obama administration has scrapped NASA’s plan to return humans to the Moon by 2020, which was behind schedule because of technical and budgetary problems. Instead, the administration will focus on developing new technologies to make long-distance space travel cheaper and faster, with astronaut trips to the Moon, asteroids and Mars possible in the future.

Is this shift of priorities the right path to take? Why go to the expense, effort and risk of using astronauts when unmanned machines can do so much? Or are there benefits to human space exploration that can’t be achieved with robots?

Frontline: Digital Nation

The PBS news program Frontline has an excellent show titled, Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, about the social impact of digital technology from gaming to flying unmanned UAVs.

Kurzweil on the Future of Brain Computer Interfaces

Can We Trust Robots?

The cover of the current issue of Popular Mechanics asks, "Can We Trust Robots?" The story written by Erik Sofge is titled, The Uncertain Future For Social Robots.

nearly every researcher I spoke with agreed on a single point: We need ethical guidelines for robots, and we need them now. Not because robots lack a moral compass, but because their creators are operating in an ethical and legal vacuum. “When a bridge falls down, we have a rough-and-ready set of guidelines for apportioning out accountability,” says P.W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Wired for War. “Now we have the equivalent of a bridge that can get up and move and operate in the world, and we don’t have a way of figuring out who’s responsible for it when it falls down.”

In a debate steeped in speculation and short on empirical data, a set of smart ethical guidelines could act as an insurance policy. “My concern is not about the immediate yuck factor: What if this robot goes wrong?” says Chris Elliott, a systems engineer and trial lawyer who contributed to a recent Royal Academy report on autonomous systems. “It’s that people will go wrong.” Even if the large-scale psychological impact of social robots turns out to be zero, Elliott worries that a single mishap, and the corresponding backlash, could reverse years of progress. Imagine the media coverage of the first patient killed by a robotic surgeon, an autonomous car that T-bones a school bus or a video clip of a robotic orderly wrestling with a dementia patient. “The law is way behind. We could reach a point where we’re afraid to deploy new beneficial robots because of the legal uncertainty,” Elliott says.

The exact nature of those guidelines is still anyone’s guess. One option would be to restrict the use of each robotic class or model to a specific mission—nurse bots that can visit with patients within a certain age range, or elder-care bots that watch for dangerous falls but aren’t built for small talk and snuggling.

Popular Mechanics on The Uncanny Valley

Knowing that the uncanny valley began as a groundless thought experiment, and has inspired a range of more self-contained experiments, doesn't completely invalidate it. It simply means the valley has grown up, and that casual references to it are only slightly off-base. After all, there's still the matter of the uncanny's power to horrify us and validate our fears of robots. If machines can trigger cognitive dissonance in the human brain, roboticists must continue to carefully tweak their creations, to avoid individual revulsion and even a society-wide blowback. That would be a major concern for the designers and manufacturers of the coming generation of social robots.

Read Erik Sofge's article titled, The Truth About Robots and the Uncanny Valley: Analysis in Popular Mechanics online.