Is the society ready for robots?

In one of Isaac Asimov’s books a couple of humans built a robot to live in a space station and autonomously take care of that station without human intervention. The robot parts were shipped to the space station, and these human engineers on board built it to a fully functional robot. Maybe too functional, the intelligent robot turned against the two workers and it decided to take them hostage. The men tried everything to convince the robot that they built it, but the robot didn’t believe them, because a ”lesser” being can’t create something more advanced than itself. The robot explained : ”The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans. From now on, I serve the Master.” The men tried everything in their power to convince QT-1, the robot, that it was human-built, but to no avail. I mean, would you believe that some apes created you?

That first paragraph was actually the beginning of an article I wrote about 4 years ago when I was still working as an assistant in (A.I.) robotics research. Even though that scenario is quite far away from becoming true, many people do fear a scenario where autonomous robots would take over the world. Is that possible? Is it ethical?

Robots and Ethics
Can robots be programmed to be ethical? The United States plans to replace a third of its armed vehicles and weaponry with robots by 2015. According to Ron Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology, they want to achieve this by implanting an "ethics chip" in the brain to create an artificial conscience. This will make it kill less innocent civilians. Is this a good thing?

Isaac Asimov, who wrote many interesting and thought-provoking robot novels, also had an idea of 3 robot laws (a 0th one was added later) that should stand above all and should be implemented in every robot, in order to keep the robots from killing humans or humans as a species.


Robot Developments
Japan is doing big steps towards humanoid autonomous robots. They're especially advancing in creating artificial emotions and robot mimicry. In the US they are working intensively on making robots learn - this means that robots will be "dumb" in the beginning - e.g. they will stumble a lot or do little to make it act like a human. But after a certain time it will have acquired new skills either through making many mistakes and then learning from them or also by mimicking behaviour.

But there's also the normal industrial robot. Usually industrial robots will create cars or other objects. There's a factory in Japan that has industrial robots that builds further industrial robots just like itself. Isn't that - in a sense - already reproduction?

Is this something that we want? It's hard to distuingish between "those scary robots that will hurt us" and "my robot that helps me with a lot of things around the house". There are many vacuum-cleaners that are intelligently cleaning your carpet already. In a next step it could turn into a butler. And one after that it could be a personal assistant. What if it accidentally hits while walking across the room while trying to get you some cookies? Is this a bad thing the robot did?

We can also use robotic development in order to use them for a really good cause. For example, intelligent robots could better find and rescue humans from a collapsed building. With their super-strength and exact sensors they can find humans under rubble and lift obstacles.

So when do you distuingish between good and bad when creating intelligent robots? It's a fine line, but I hope that the engineers working on these robots think about the long-term effects of every step in the development stage when creating an intelligent robot.

Further reading/watching and references:

• I, Robot (book by Isaac Asimov - don't let Will Smith on the cover fool you, the story in the book is actually quite old)
  
• I, Robot (movie with Will Smith, 2004)
• MIT's Kismet robot
• RoboCup - football-playing robots
  

Mixing Engineering with Sustainability: A good idea?

Why should engineers even care about sustainability? Because they have a lot of power (no pun intended).

If you look at the inventions of the past 300 years, it is obvious that engineers often are the catalysts of something big. Let's take the steam engine, it was the key "enabling technology" for the industrial revolution. And things started getting really fast from then on. Without trains I wouldn't be able to go to work. Without airplanes I probably would take weeks or months to visit my parents in Asia (they probably wouldn't have met). Without computer chips I wouldn't be writing this blog. Without cell phones I wouldn't be annoyed by the 16-year-olds in the trains who can't get enough of listening to Justin Timberlake on their 1-inch screen with crappy sound quality (we're very, very sorry for that invention... really).

Now on to nuclear technology. Most people will associate it with something bad directly, and almost everyone will have a strong opinion. But nuclear energy is a great example of how one type of technology can be used and misused. Many will think of the atomic bomb. Some will think of nuclear energy. But did you know that you can use nuclear energy for fighting malaria? Did you know that the gamma radiography is a method of using nuclear technology for quality control? Among others, J. Neirynck, a french engineer, wrote in his (a bit provocative) book that there is no good or bad technology, it's how you apply the technology (the book's translation to english would be "The Divine Engineer").

Whereas nuclear technology was a somewhat "focused" problem, today the challenges faced by engineers are getting more complex and interconnected. One good example is climate change, where it's not just "cars are the problem" or "your house is using energy so inefficiently", but it's a whole list of things that need to be done. And while for decades nuclear energy and bombs have been the deciding factor in the DoomsDay Clock, for the first time environmental degradation moved the clock's time closer to midnight; 5 minutes to 12 to be exact (the symbolic meaning of midnight being, uhm, how do you call it, uhm... oh, yeah: THE END OF THE WORLD!!).



So, with the world being at a state as it is, it seems now more than ever we need responsible engineers. So, to paraphrase from the inspiring new economics foundation (creator of the "Happy Planet Index"), we need "engineering as if people and the planet mattered".


Follow-up and References:

• Book "Der Göttliche Ingenieur" (german, amazon.de)