UAV's and other machines and robots are already in use in the worlds leading armed forces. But still there is still some form of human interface within the decision progress.

What is your opinion about using sofisticated self reliable machines and robots in the armed forces in terms of ethics.

Although this development is higly popular within the military, personally I found it worrysome. Peace is partly always based on the fact it took human lives. Both civilian lives as well of the those in the armed forces.
Politicians and the military are often reluctant to take actions because of the the human element and the possibility of loosing them in a small scale conflict. But with machines fighting, or even better machines fighting enemy machines, with no form of human element, who would be interested in peace with this 'clean' and 'ethical' war.





Besides there is the everlasting fear they might surpass us.

I think Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" is a good point for reference:

http://www.androidworld.com/prod22.htm

Yes but these laws would only apply to civilian robots. The military would have no interest in robots and independant operating machines if they would apply these rules.

And I also have doubts about the 3rd rule of Asimov. Why should a robot always seek for its selfpersevation. If they are harmed by some form of accident they can be easily fixed.
The only situation that would truly bring their existence in danger is when a human would seek to destroy it. So you see it seems that the 3rd rule is deemed to conflict with the first 2 rules.

3rd law is there so that someone cannot order them to self destruct themselves, but they will not hesitate to destroy themselves to save a human. Intelligence alone doesnt mean anything. It should make sure that it survives and it doesnt destroy itself or let something destroy its existence. It would be really easy for anti-robot people to end the days of robots on earth if the 3rd law was not installed.

I agree with orko that there must be strict laws on governing acts of intelligent robots and Asimovs laws are a good start point like he stated.

Military use of uncontrolled intelligence will just lead to the intelligence turning against its own creator like in the matrix universe. Its something we should avoid.

Indeed intelligence alone isnt sufficient it also needs a level of consciousness. And I believe if machiness reaches a high level of consciousness it doesnt need some digital code in order to perserve itself. It would seek selfpersevation out on its own and woudnt need the 3rd code of Asimov (or the other 2 for the same matter). The rules of Asimov would only apply for droids, intelligent enough to react on its own to its envirement but not conscious and thus still higly dependant on humans.

That is why Asimov suggests such rules that will make the robot unoperable(dead) if it does anything that conflicts with the first 2 rules. i.e cause watching death of a human -even by accident- and not try to save the person, kills the robot.

In Asimovs books the robot brain is a positronic device and its production is costly and once damaged it cannot be rapaired thus the 3rd rule exists. But even if the opposite you would need the 3rd rule if not your neighbor would tell your robot to kill itself and it would just kill itself. Indeed there not enough processing power in todays world to create a self conscious intelligence and we dont know how much it would cost to build such a processing unit of that size or power..

Mind you , 3rd law also says it is aplicable as long as it doesnt conflict with the first 2 laws. So its there to make sure the robots will act to defend a humans life even if it will cost their own life (which you wouldnt expect from a being that only tries to exist, unless it has strong ties to the being under danger, like a mom /dad to child etc..)

Here are some articles about it in the economist and the times
Trust me, I'm a robot

Jun 8th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Robot safety: As robots move into homes and offices, ensuring that they do not injure people will be vital. But how?

N 1981 Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot.

This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behaviour was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction writer. The laws appeared in “I, Robot”, a book of short stories published in 1950 that inspired a recent Hollywood film. But decades later the laws, designed to prevent robots from harming people either through action or inaction (see table), remain in the realm of fiction.

Indeed, despite the introduction of improved safety mechanisms, robots have claimed many more victims since 1981. Over the years people have been crushed, hit on the head, welded and even had molten aluminium poured over them by robots. Last year there were 77 robot-related accidents in Britain alone, according to the Health and Safety Executive.

With robots now poised to emerge from their industrial cages and to move into homes and workplaces, roboticists are concerned about the safety implications beyond the factory floor. To address these concerns, leading robot experts have come together to try to find ways to prevent robots from harming people. Inspired by the Pugwash Conferences—an international group of scientists, academics and activists founded in 1957 to campaign for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons—the new group of robo-ethicists met earlier this year in Genoa, Italy, and announced their initial findings in March at the European Robotics Symposium in Palermo, Sicily.

“Security, safety and sex are the big concerns,” says Henrik Christensen, chairman of the European Robotics Network at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and one of the organisers of the new robo-ethics group. Should robots that are strong enough or heavy enough to crush people be allowed into homes? Is “system malfunction” a justifiable defence for a robotic fighter plane that contravenes the Geneva Convention and mistakenly fires on innocent civilians? And should robotic sex dolls resembling children be legally allowed?

These questions may seem esoteric but in the next few years they will become increasingly relevant, says Dr Christensen. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe's World Robotics Survey, in 2002 the number of domestic and service robots more than tripled, nearly outstripping their industrial counterparts. By the end of 2003 there were more than 600,000 robot vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers—a figure predicted to rise to more than 4m by the end of next year. Japanese industrial firms are racing to build humanoid robots to act as domestic helpers for the elderly, and South Korea has set a goal that 100% of households should have domestic robots by 2020. In light of all this, it is crucial that we start to think about safety and ethical guidelines now, says Dr Christensen.
Stop right there

So what exactly is being done to protect us from these mechanical menaces? “Not enough,” says Blay Whitby, an artificial-intelligence expert at the University of Sussex in England. This is hardly surprising given that the field of “safety-critical computing” is barely a decade old, he says. But things are changing, and researchers are increasingly taking an interest in trying to make robots safer. One approach, which sounds simple enough, is try to program them to avoid contact with people altogether. But this is much harder than it sounds. Getting a robot to navigate across a cluttered room is difficult enough without having to take into account what its various limbs or appendages might bump into along the way.

Regulating the behaviour of robots is going to become more difficult in the future, since they will increasingly have self-learning mechanisms built into them, says Gianmarco Veruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, Italy. As a result, their behaviour will become impossible to predict fully, he says, since they will not be behaving in predefined ways but will learn new behaviour as they go.

Then there is the question of unpredictable failures. What happens if a robot's motors stop working, or it suffers a system failure just as it is performing heart surgery or handing you a cup of hot coffee? You can, of course, build in redundancy by adding backup systems, says Hirochika Inoue, a veteran roboticist at the University of Tokyo who is now an adviser to the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. But this guarantees nothing, he says. “One hundred per cent safety is impossible through technology,” says Dr Inoue. This is because ultimately no matter how thorough you are, you cannot anticipate the unpredictable nature of human behaviour, he says. Or to put it another way, no matter how sophisticated your robot is at avoiding people, people might not always manage to avoid it, and could end up tripping over it and falling down the stairs.

Legal problems
So where does this leave Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics? They were a narrative device, and were never actually meant to work in the real world, says Dr Whitby. Quite apart from the fact that the laws require the robot to have some form of human-like intelligence, which robots still lack, the laws themselves don't actually work very well. Indeed, Asimov repeatedly knocked them down in his robot stories, showing time and again how these seemingly watertight rules could produce unintended consequences.

In any case, says Dr Inoue, the laws really just encapsulate commonsense principles that are already applied to the design of most modern appliances, both domestic and industrial. Every toaster, lawn mower and mobile phone is designed to minimise the risk of causing injury—yet people still manage to electrocute themselves, lose fingers or fall out of windows in an effort to get a better signal. At the very least, robots must meet the rigorous safety standards that cover existing products. The question is whether new, robot-specific rules are needed—and, if so, what they should say.

“Making sure robots are safe will be critical,” says Colin Angle of iRobot, which has sold over 2m “Roomba” household-vacuuming robots. But he argues that his firm's robots are, in fact, much safer than some popular toys. “A radio-controlled car controlled by a six-year old is far more dangerous than a Roomba,” he says. If you tread on a Roomba, it will not cause you to slip over; instead, a rubber pad on its base grips the floor and prevents it from moving. “Existing regulations will address much of the challenge,” says Mr Angle. “I'm not yet convinced that robots are sufficiently different that they deserve special treatment.”

Robot safety is likely to surface in the civil courts as a matter of product liability. “When the first robot carpet-sweeper sucks up a baby, who will be to blame?” asks John Hallam, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. If a robot is autonomous and capable of learning, can its designer be held responsible for all its actions? Today the answer to these questions is generally “yes”. But as robots grow in complexity it will become a lot less clear cut, he says.

“Right now, no insurance company is prepared to insure robots,” says Dr Inoue. But that will have to change, he says. Last month, Japan's ministry of trade and industry announced a set of safety guidelines for home and office robots. They will be required to have sensors to help them avoid collisions with humans; to be made from soft and light materials to minimise harm if a collision does occur; and to have an emergency shut-off button. This was largely prompted by a big robot exhibition held last summer, which made the authorities realise that there are safety implications when thousands of people are not just looking at robots, but mingling with them, says Dr Inoue.

However, the idea that general-purpose robots, capable of learning, will become widespread is wrong, suggests Mr Angle. It is more likely, he believes, that robots will be relatively dumb machines designed for particular tasks. Rather than a humanoid robot maid, “it's going to be a heterogeneous swarm of robots that will take care of the house,” he says.

Probably the area of robotics that is likely to prove most controversial is the development of robotic sex toys, says Dr Christensen. “People are going to be having sex with robots in the next five years,” he says. Initially these robots will be pretty basic, but that is unlikely to put people off, he says. “People are willing to have sex with inflatable dolls, so initially anything that moves will be an improvement.” To some this may all seem like harmless fun, but without any kind of regulation it seems only a matter of time before someone starts selling robotic sex dolls resembling children, says Dr Christensen. This is dangerous ground. Convicted paedophiles might argue that such robots could be used as a form of therapy, while others would object on the grounds that they would only serve to feed an extremely dangerous fantasy.

All of which raises another question. As well as posing physical danger, might robots also be dangerous to humans in less direct ways, by bringing out their worst aspects, from warfare to paedophilia? As Ron Arkin, a roboticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, puts it: “If you kick a robotic dog, are you then more likely to kick a real one?” Roboticists can do their best to make robots safe—but they cannot reprogram the behaviour of their human masters.

http://www.economist.com

The Sunday Times June 18, 2006

No sex please, robot, just clean the floor
Ed Habershon and Richard Woods

THE race is on to keep humans one step ahead of robots: an international team of scientists and academics is to publish a “code of ethics” for machines as they become more and more sophisticated.

Although the nightmare vision of a Terminator world controlled by machines may seem fanciful, scientists believe the boundaries for human-robot interaction must be set now — before super-intelligent robots develop beyond our control.

“There are two levels of priority,” said Gianmarco Verruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, northern Italy, and chief architect of the guide, to be published next month. “We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots.”

Verruggio and his colleagues have identified key areas that include: ensuring human control of robots; preventing illegal use; protecting data acquired by robots; and establishing clear identification and traceability of the machines.

“Scientists must start analysing these kinds of questions and seeing if laws or regulations are needed to protect the citizen,” said Verruggio. “Robots will develop strong intelligence, and in some ways it will be better than human intelligence.

“But it will be alien intelligence; I would prefer to give priority to humans.”

The analysis culminated at a meeting recently held in Genoa by the European Robotics Research Network (Euron) that examined the problems likely to arise as robots become smarter, faster, stronger and ubiquitous.

“Security, safety and sex are the big concerns,” said Henrik Christensen, a member of the Euron ethics group. How far should robots be allowed to influence people’s lives? How can accidents be avoided? Can deliberate harm be prevented? And what happens if robots turn out to be sexy?

“The question is what authority are we going to delegate to these machines?” said Professor Ronald Arkin, a roboticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “Are we, for example, going to give robots the ability to execute lethal force, or any force, like crowd control?”

The forthcoming code is a sign of reality finally catching up with science fiction. Ethical problems involving machines were predicted in the 1950s by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov whose book I, Robot was recently turned into a Hollywood film. The Terminator and Robocop series of films also portrayed mechanical law enforcers running amok.

Present robots perform more mundane tasks: the most common consumer robots in Britain include self-guided vacuum cleaners such as the Scooba, lawnmowers such as the Robomow and children’s toys such as Robosapien.

But far more sophisticated machines are being developed. The National Health Service has used a robot called da Vinci to perform surgery at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London. In Japan, human-like robots such as Honda’s Asimo and Sony’s Qrio can walk on two legs. More advanced versions are expected to be undertaking everyday domestic tasks and helping to care for the elderly in as little as 20 years.

“I would hope they would always be subordinate,” said Brian Aldiss, the science fiction writer. “But one will no doubt come to rely on them deeply.” Aldiss’s short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long was the basis for the Steven Spielberg film AI, which addressed the subject of whether androids that have become as intelligent as humans should be denied equal rights.

Other dilemmas may arrive sooner than we think, says Christensen. “People are going to be having sex with robots within five years,” he said. So should limits be set on the appearance, for example, of such robotic sex toys?

The greatest danger, however, is likely to lie with robots that are able to learn from their “experiences”. As systems develop, robots are likely to have much more sophisticated self-learning mechanisms built into them and it may become impossible to predict exactly how they will behave.

“My guess is that we’ll have conscious machines before 2020,” said Ian Pearson, futurologist-in-residence at BT. “If we put that in a robot, it’s an android. That is an enormous ethical change.”

To critics who scoff that intelligent robots are a long way off, the roboticists easily riposte that machines can already exert surprising influence over our lives — think about the influence of the internet.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/

For me,as far as they follow the 3 rules of asimov,it's ok. But in military is a very delicate matter should be taken into serious consideration....we do not eant to end up like matrix do we?????