The world imitates science fiction once again, as South Korea announces a project to draw up a code of ethics “to stop humans misusing robots – or vice versa.”

“Hye-Young adds that the government’s guidelines will reflect the “Three Laws of Robotics” put forward by science fiction author Isaac Asimov.”

Good old Isaac - his mark on history is assured, the media can’t write a robot article without giving him a plug…

This headline rang Pavlovian bells for me, and I realised that was because I blogged about a very similar announcement from the European Robotics Research Network back in June 2006, in a post called ‘Legislating against robot rape‘ (which naturally mentions Asimov’s Laws, because I wasn’t so worried about cliche back then, cough cough):

“You can’t rape an autonomous vacuum cleaner (although you could conceivably have sex with it, and knowing humans, people probably already have - the tales of people with vacuum related injuries turning up in casualty departments are too common to be completely unfounded). But something with a mind of its own, however limited? That’s another question entirely.”

Despite its potential import, it’s a hard subject to treat seriously in journalistic mode - but it seems to fare far better in fiction. Curious.

Opinion is still divided over the whole ‘wisdom of crowds’ idea. But the occasional inaccuracy (and somewhat more frequent bad spelling and grammar) does nothing to deter thousands of users, including myself, who want their answers quickly and conveniently.

Continue reading “Wikipedia, communities and consensus knowledge”

As mentioned previously, yours truly is off to a ‘Cafe Scientifique’ about conscious machines this evening. So what better time to discuss robot ethics? Continue reading “Legislating against robot rape”