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July 18, 2004
Movie Tests Asimov's Moral Code for Robots
New Scientist, July 16, 2004
The possibility of developing truly intelligent machines, and their potential to be friend or foe to humanity, gets the Hollywood treatment in a new blockbuster film I, Robot, which opens in the US on Friday.
At the heart of the movie are Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”, invented as a simple, but immutable moral code for robots. The film’s plot revolves around an apparent breaking of the laws, when a robot is suspected of murdering a famous scientist.
Yet, while the movie is an enjoyable action romp, robotics and artificial intelligence experts admit they are a long way from having to worry about such rules yet. “The difficulty is building something that would understand them,” says Alan Bundy, at Edinburgh University’s Artificial Intelligence Institute in the UK. “That is well beyond the state of the art at the moment.”
Bundy notes that simple safety measures are already a crucial part of the design of industrial robots, which have in rare cases caused the death of people. But these measure are hardly the same as Asimov’s laws, he says.
“It is interesting to think about what would be required to make something that would obey the laws,” he told New Scientist. “But all we can do for now is to build rules in at a simple level.”
“Movie Tests Asimov’s Moral Code for Robots”
Posted by SIAI at July 18, 2004 12:53 AM