Archive for the ‘International’ Category:
Ethical Robots
I have just finished a semester doing a subject called ‘Professional Issues in Information Technology‘ which I found immensely fascinating and out of curiosity and a break from exam study I started looking up some topics relating to it on the Internet and I came across this article:
No sex please, robot, just clean the floor
I’ll just mention a few good quotes here:
“We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots.”
…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.
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 whole idea is that there will be a team drawing up a code of ethics for both robots/AI and the scientists who create them.
I totally agree with the article above but there are few things that got me thinking that I want to elaborate on.
Read more »
Scientific Whaling
I have a feeling of shock and disgust when I see pictures and film of the Japanese on their scientific whaling expeditions it, for me it was just my gut reaction saying that it just doesn’t make any sense, but since I’m a rational person I think that there are more plausible reasons why they don’t seem to be able to amply justify what they are doing. Since it is a scientific program a good measurement of its usefulness would be the quality of the output of papers that they are producing.
I’ll just summarise it here:
- In the 18 years that JARPA 1 has been running, it has produced 55 papers can be remotely classified as credible
- 14 of those 55 paper are relevant to scientific whaling
- 4 out of the 14 papers require the hunting and killing of whales to produce results
- How many whales were killed in 18 years: 6800
- Whales per credible scientific paper produced: 1700