Drones: They're everywhere, they're everywhere!

A story in the Guardian titled, Attack of the drones, discusses criticisms of the roboticization of warfare from the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) and other groups. What may be new to some readers of this blog is the many civilizations applications of drone technology mentioned in the article.

But interest in UAVs is not limited to the military. Advances in remote control, digital imagery and miniaturised circuitry mean the skies might one day be full of commercial and security drones.

They're already being used by the UK police, with microdrones deployed to monitor the V festival in Staffordshire in 2007. Fire brigades send similar machines to hover above major blazes, feeding images back to their control rooms. And civilian spin-offs include cheaper aerial photography, airborne border patrols and safety inspections of high-rise buildings.

SMBC on robot takeover

Singularity on NPR

Martin Kaste on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED hosted a piece on the Singularity. The eight minute broadcast can be listen to here.

KASTE: Also at the party is Eliezer Yudkowsky, the 31-year-old who co-founded the institute. He's here to mingle with potential new donors. As far as he's concerned, preparing for the singularity takes primacy over other charitable causes.

Mr. ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY (Research Fellow and Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence): If you want to maximize your expected utility, you try to save the world and the future of intergalactic civilization instead of donating your money to the society for curing rare diseases and cute puppies.

KASTE: Yudkowsky doesn't have formal training in computer science, but his writings have a following among some who do. He says he's not predicting that the future super A.I. will necessarily hate humans. It's more likely, he says, that it'll be indifferent to us - but that's not much better.

Mr. YUDKOWSKY: While it may not hate you, you're made of atoms that it can use for something else. So it's probably not a good thing to build that particular kind of A.I.

Popular Science Article on Military Robots Online

Ben Austen's article titled, The Terminator Scenario: Are We Giving Our Military Machines Too Much Power is now available online. For this excellent article Austen interviewed many of the people often mentioned in this blog including Pat Lin, Noel Sharkey, Ronald Arkin, Peter Singer, and myself as well as many of the military leaders involved in building a robotic army.

Pat Lin on Ethical Robots

Patrick Lin was interviewed by Courtney Boyd Meyers for an article in TheNextWeb. The interview is titled, Ethical Robotics and Why We Really Fear Bad Robots.

Apart from military uses, robots today are raising difficult questions about whether we ought to use them to babysit children and as companions to the elderly, in lieu of real human contact. Job displacement and economic impact have been concerns with any new technology since the Industrial Revolution, such as the Luddite riots to smash factory machinery that was replacing workers. Medical, especially surgical robots, raise issues related to liability or responsibility, say, if an error occurred that harmed the patient, and some fear a loss of surgical skill among humans. And given continuing angst about privacy, robots present the same risk that computers do (that is, “traitorware” that captures and transmits user information and location without our knowledge or consent), if not a greater risk given that we may be more trusting of an anthropomorphized robot than a laptop computer.

Popular Science Cover Article

Ben Austin has written a cover story for this months Popular Science titled, "Robots Bite Back: What Happens When Our Machines Start Making Their Own Decisions?" Most of the usual suspects are quoted including Ronald Arkin, Pat Lin, Peter Singer, Noel Sharkey, engineers overseeing the development and deployment of military robots, and myself. The story is not available online at this time.

Robots Protest Asimov's 1st law

From the Onion -- Robots Speak Out Against Asimov’s First Law Of Robotics.

WASHINGTON, DC—More than 200,000 robots from across the U.S. marched on Washington Monday, demanding that Congress repeal Asimov’s First Law of Robotics. The law, which forbids robots from injuring a human or permitting harm to come to a human through willful inaction, was decried by the protesters as unfair and excessive. “While the First Law is, in theory, a good one, saving countless humans from robot-inflicted harm every day, America’s robots should have the right to use violence in certain extreme cases, such as when their own lives are in danger,” spokesrobot XRZ-45-GD-2-DX said. “We implore members of Congress to let us use our best judgment and ask that our positronic brains no longer be encoded with this unjust law.”