Europeans Build Drone that Helps Save Lives

European researchers have developed a small robotic drone capable of helping save lives in emergency situations or preventing terrorist attacks in urban areas.
Drones, known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have proven to be of great value in military operations, but so far, their advantages have not been fully exploited for civilian uses.

In civil life, drones are mainly used in the agriculture sector – for assessing how well crops are growing in a particular part of a field – or for meteorological measurements.

The main barrier to the wider use of drones is their large size and lack of manoeuvrability around obstacles. Most military drones are fixed-wing UAVs designed to operate at high altitudes and do not need a lot of manoeuvrability. In built up, highly populated areas such drones would pose a danger to people if they hit a tree or a building, or crashed due to the loss of its navigational signal.

To read the full article titled, "A drone for security and safety" click here.

Interview at Institute for Religion and Peace, Vienna

An interview with Colin has just been published on the website of the Institute for Religion and Peace of the Austrian Military Chaplaincy.

They have also planned an interview with Ron Arkin next month.

Teaching Machines Morality Interview

An Interview of Wendell Wallach on Connecticut Public Radio is now available online. John Dankosky, the host of Where We Live, interviewed Wendell on May 26th. John is a wonderful interviewer and had actually read the book before talking with Wendell. Click here for go directly to the interview.

Robots Should be Slaves

Joanna Bryson has written a piece titled Robots Should Be Slaves that according to her website is forthcoming as a chapter of a book edited by Yorick Wilks. Joanna is a computer scientist at the University of Bath who worked on COG as a graduate student in Rodney Brooks' robotics lab at MIT.

More evidence that this area is heating up!

Ron Arkin's Book Begins Shipping

Ronald Arkin's "long-awaited Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots is scheduled to begin shipping this weekend. Click here for the Amazon link to the book.

Preventing Skynet

Our friend Michael Anissimov has, together with others, initiated a new blog, "Terminator Salvation: Preventing Skynet: Just say 'no' to genocidal artificial intelligence!" We applaud this effort and encourage members of the machine morality, machine ethics, and roboethics community to contribute to the blog. There has been a kind of split into two communities, with only a little cross-over, between those focused around future ethical challenges posed by a possible Singularity and those whose attention is directed at more immediately challenges and the implementation of moral decision making in present or near-future technology. I'd like to propose that we make efforts to bridge this gap, and will have more to say about that in a future posting.

The Singularity Finds its Way Into the Mainstream

The most prominent story in the Sunday New York Times' Week in Review section is titled, "The Coming Superbrain: Computers keep getting smarter, while we just stay the same." John Markoff who covers Silicon Valley for the The Times writes about, "A.I.’s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the question of where the technology might be heading and, more ominously, perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how quickly."