Deceptive Robots

Gizmag describes research by Ronald Arkin and Alan Wagner in which robots are taught to deceive.

What it all boiled down to was a series of 20 hide-and-seek experiments. The autonomous hiding/deceiving robot could randomly choose one of three hiding spots, and would have no choice but to knock over one of three paths of colored markers to get there. The seeking robot could then, presumably, find the hiding robot by identifying which path of markers was knocked down. Sounds easy, except that sneaky, conniving hiding robot would turn around after knocking down one path of markers, and go hide in one of the other spots.

In 75 percent of the trials, the hiding robot succeeded in evading the seeking robot. In the other 25 percent, it wasn’t able to knock down the right markers necessary to produce its desired deception. The full results of the Georgia Tech experiment were recently published in the International Journal of Social Robotics.

The full research article is title, Acting Deceptively:Providing Robots with the Capacity for Deception.

Abstract Deception is utilized by a variety of intelligent systems ranging from insects to human beings. It has been argued that the use of deception is an indicator of theory of mind (Cheney and Seyfarth in Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, 2008) and of social intelligence (Hauser in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 89:12137–12139, 1992). We use interdependence theory and game theory to explore the phenomena of deception from the perspective of robotics, and to develop an algorithm which allows an artificially intelligent system to determine if deception is warranted in a social situation. Using techniques introduced in Wagner (Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2009), 2009), we present an algorithm that bases a robot’s deceptive action selection on its model of the individual it’s attempting to deceive. Simulation and robot experiments using these algorithms which investigate the nature of deception itself are discussed.

Newer videos of ECCEROBOT

Is a Robot Crime Wave on the Near Horizon?

The Coming Robot Crime Wave is an article by Noel Sharkey, Marc Goodman, and Nick Ross, which outlines a number of ways in which present and future robotic systems will be adapted to perpetrate a wide variety of illegal activities. One example they discuss is Narco submarines.

Major criminal organizations such as drug cartels don’t need to rely on cheap home engineering. Discoveries of submarines designed to carry tons of narcotics have been occurring since 1988. With 10 tons of cocaine netting $200 million, $2 million for a submarine would repay the robot’s cost many times over in one voyage. The drug cartels clearly have the money to adapt their technology to keep ahead of enforcement agencies.

Once the exclusive and secretive preserve of the military, this technology is becoming commonplace in civilian applications, with marine robots a prime example. So far, they’ve been used to locate the Titanic, investigate ice caps, build deep sea oil rigs, repair undersea cables, and mitigate environmental catastrophes such as the recent Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2010, US officials secured the first convictions for remote-controlled drug smuggling when they imprisoned three men for building and selling drug subs (http://bit.ly/ b8Qawc). At the Tampa hearing, attorney Joseph K. Ruddy reported that these remote-controlled submarines were up to 40 feet long and could carry 1,800 kilograms of cocaine 1,000 miles without refueling. The effectiveness of these submarines in avoiding detection is clear, given that none have ever been seized. We only hear about the criminals’ failures, so there could be none, dozens, or hundreds of these machines in use.

The latest autonomous and semiautonomous submarine capabilities pose a greater concern. They can act on their own when required, employ programmed avoidance routines to thwart authorities, be fitted with sensors to send signals to the operator when the payload is delivered or the craft attacked, and carry self-destruct features to destroy incriminating evidence.

TILT 2011: Technologies on the stand: legal and ethical questions in neuroscience and robotics.

The Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) is proud to announce the upcoming TILTing Perspectives 2011 conference entitled

"Technologies on the stand: legal and ethical questions in neuroscience and robotics."

The conference will be held at Tilburg University (the Netherlands) on 11 and 12 April 2011. It will focus on the legal and ethical questions raised by the application of neuroscience and robotics in various contexts. The conference will have two independent, but related tracks:

1. Law and neuroscience
The first track will focus on the legal and ethical issues surrounding recent developments in neuroscience and the legal application of neurotechnologies. Discussion topics will include, but are not limited to:
- the possible use of neurotechnologies in a legal context and the implications thereof,
- the role of neuroscience in determining legal capacities and in detecting deception,
- the legal and ethical issues surrounding the medical application of neurotechnologies, and
- the legal and ethical implications of using neurotechnologies for enhancement purposes.

2. Law, ethics and robotics
The second track will focus on the legal and ethical implications of the application of robotics in social environments (e.g., the home, hospitals and other health care institutes, in traffic, but also in war). Discussion topics will include, but are not limited to:
- the legal and ethical questions raised by the proliferation of robotics for the home environment,
- the legal and ethical questions raised by the deployment of robotics in war,
- liability and the legal status of robots, and
- autonomous action, agency and the ethical implications thereof.

The conference aims at bringing together national and international experts from the fields of (1) law and neuroscience and (2) law, ethics and robotics, and to facilitate discussion between lawyers, legal scholars, psychologists, social scientists, philosophers, neuroscientists and policy makers.

Our confirmed keynote speakers are:
- Stephen Morse (University of Pennsylvania)
- Paul Wolpe (Emory University)
- Wendell Wallach (Yale University)
- Noel Sharkey (University of Sheffield)

If you would like to present a paper at this conference, please send in an abstract (of max. 350 words) using the abstract submission system on our website:http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/faculties/law/research/tilt/events/tilting2011/abssubmission/

Abstract submission is open from 1 September until 15 October. You may submit an abstract on the topics suggested above, or on a related topic that falls within the conference theme.

Full papers will be published in the conference proceedings. The winning paper in the Best Paper Contest will be published in a special edition of the international, peer reviewed journal Law, Innovation and Technology (Hart Publishers).

Important dates for submission:
- Deadline for submission of abstract: 15 October 2010
- Notification of acceptance and invitation to write a full paper: 1 November 2010
- Deadline for submission of full papers: 15 December 2010
- Reviewers' feedback and comments: 31 January 2011
- Deadline for submission of revised papers: 15 March 2011
- Conference dates: 11 and 12 April

For more information, please visit our website: http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/faculties/law/research/tilt/events/tilting2011/

Flash Crash Ethics

Aug 29: Australian Broadcasting radio show Background Briefing aired a story on "the flash crash" for which Colin was interviewed (at the end).

Program description:

A few months ago the US share market plunged l000 points in a few minutes, and trillions were traded both up and down. What caused it, and can it happen again? Tiny high frequency computer algorithms - or algos - roam the markets, buying and selling in a parallel universe more or less uncontrolled by anyone. Did they go feral, or was it the fat finger of a coked out trader? In September US regulators bring out their findings. Reporter Stan Correy.

Call for Papers

IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing

Special Issue on Ethics and Affective Computing

The pervasive presence of automated and autonomous systems necessitates the rapid growth of a relatively new area of inquiry called machine ethics. If machines are going to be turned loose on their own to kill and heal, explore and decide, the need for designing them to be moral becomes pressing. This need, in turn, penetrates to the very foundations of ethics as robot designers strive to build systems that comply. Fuzzy intuitions will not do when computational clarity is required. So, machine ethics also asks the discipline of ethics to make itself clear. The truth is that at present we do not know how to make it so. Rule-based approaches are being tried even in light of an acknowledged difficulty to formalize moral behavior, and it is already common to hear that introducing affects into machines may be necessary in order to make machines behave morally. From this perspective, affective computing may be morally required by machine ethics.

On the other hand, building machines with artificial affects might carry with it negative ethical consequences. In order to make humans more willing to accept robots and other automated computational devices, creating them to display emotion will be a help, since if we like them, we will, no doubt, be more willing to welcome them. We might even pay dearly to have them. But do artificial affects deceive? Will they catch us with our defenses down, and do we have to worry about Plato's caveat in the Republic that one of the best ways to be unjust is to appear just? Automated agents that seem like persons might appear congenial, even as any moral regard is ignored, making them dangerous culprits indistinguishable from automated "friends." In this light, machine ethics might demand that we exercise great caution in using affective computing. In radical cases, it might even demand that we not use it at all.

We would seem to have here a quandary. No doubt there are others. The purpose of this volume is to explore the range of ethical issues related to affective computing. Is affective computing necessary for making artificial agents moral? If so, why and how? Where does affective computing require moral caution? In what cases do benefits outweigh the moral risks? Etc.

Invited Authors:

Roddy Cowie (Queen's University, Belfast)
Luciano Floridi (University of Hertfordshire and University of Oxford)
Matthias Scheutz (Tufts University)

Papers must not have been previously published, with the exception that substantial extensions of conference papers can be considered. The authors will be required to follow the Author’s Guide for manuscript submission to the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing at http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tac/author. Papers are due by March 1st, 2011, and should be submitted electronically at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/taffc-cs. Please select the "SI - Ethics 2011" manuscript type upon submission. For further information, please contact guest editor, Anthony Beavers at afbeavers@gmail.com.

Willow Garage Ready to Market Beer-Fetching, Pool-Shooting Robot

You Could Own A Pool-Shooting, Beer-Fetching Willow Garage Robot