the ethics of robot objects
Alex Reid,
Digital Digs,
Dec 29, 2011
Interesting discussion of the ethics of robots. But I think that the concern is misplaced. Robots will have ethics; all objects have ethics, as Alex Reid points out. Sometimes these ethics are very simple - objects fall down, they are inert unless moved, etc. - while in other cases the ethics will be more complicated (heat the house no warmer than 85 degrees, travel at a speed no greater than 160 kph, etc). The danger isn't that our robots will not have ethics. The danger is that our robots will have the same ethics as those who designed them. In a world where the robots are built by government and corporations, to judge by contemporary practices, our robots will (always) be (potential) killing machines. After all, the first major deployments of autonomous machinery thus far have been to spy on people and then kill them. Reid would like to "begin by trying to understand what ethical relations already exist among non-human objects and use that fundamental ethical mechanic in the same way that engineers use physics to build the kinds of ethical relations we desire into new technologies." I'd like to do that first with humans, and maybe build ethical societies before we set them to building (un)ethical robots. And if you think building an ethical society is too much of a long shot, then you should regard the possibility of the ethical robot as even more so.
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