36 Just ordinAry robots
We may even lose the skills. e recent British decision to rein-
stall a nuclear energy programme highlights that. From the moment
Britain decided to stop investing in nuclear plants some years ago,
nuclear skills went into decline. Now the new plants will have to be
built by France. You may or may not like nuclear energy, but this
shows how some things are doable only when there are human beings
able to do it.”
One of the worries about social robots is that they are devoid of morality.
But according to some, they can become moral agents in their own right,
given the right software. Do you have a position in that debate?
“I was one of the rst to write about this, in the late nineties. You can
approach articial agents in two ways. One is asking, who can be a
moral agent? I argued that we should dene ‘moral agent’ in an inclu-
sive way, including for instance political parties and families, but also
animals and machines, since there is a lot of agency in the world that
is not based on human individuals. e other perspective is the one
that your question is addressing. What happens when smart robots
with a lot of autonomy, such as we might be building in 10 or 20years,
are in charge of actions with huge moral implications, in warfare,
healthcare, education, social interaction?
ere are three dierent strategies to deal with this. One says, ‘We
need to develop a morality for machines.’ I think this is utter science
ction; a pipe dream, or a pipe nightmare. It can be fun to think
about, but increasingly I think it is irresponsible to spend money and
energy on this. Because it can’t be done. Not in a very long time.
e second, more responsible strategy is to make sure that these
machines have some safety measures implanted. To grasp the con-
cept, think of microwave ovens: you cannot commit suicide by putting
your head in them, because they won’t work when the door is open.
e machine is not moral in itself, but we can design standards that
are morally good. In the case of drones, we could decide internation-
ally that they cannot possibly re under certain conditions or that,
if they lose control, they will go to the nearest sea and drown them-
selves. is is not as exciting as ‘moral machines,’ but on the plus side,
it is doable.
e third strategy, which can go together with the second, is to
have a human in control. Not in-the-loop—the robot can operate on
37robots everywhere
its own—but on-the-loop, supervising—if something goes wrong, it
can be stopped. It’s like the Mars Rovers: they are autonomous, but
NASA can intervene.
Unfortunately, quite a few people keep believing in the moral-
machine option. Some think that machines can develop morality the
way babies do, on the basis of feedback to their actions. But really,
there is nothing in computer science at the moment to justify think-
ing that this is even remotely feasible. For let’s face it, we don’t even
have articial intelligence yet; we have articial smartness. I remem-
ber how John McCarthy, who coined the word AI, was deeply disap-
pointed with Deep Blue, the chess computer who beat Kasparov, but
only because it had a database lled with matches played by humans.
My wife, who is a neuroscientist here in Oxford, tells me we still
know very little about human intelligence, so how can we build an
articial version? We have discovered this new continent, the human
brain, but we’ve only just set foot on the beach. Can we reproduce a
continent on the basis of a mere beach? Yet there is a whole church of
believers in articial intelligence and you can’t talk them out of their
faith. I’ve given up trying.”
EXPERT INTERVIEWS AS A BONUS
At the end of each chapter, except for the conclusive one, the reader
will nd an elaborate interview with an internationally acknowl-
edged expert. After Chapters 1 through 6, interviews can be read
from, respectively: Luciano Floridi (Philosopher and Ethicist
of Information at Oxford University in the United Kingdom),
Kerstin Dautenbach (Professor of Articial Intelligence at the
University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom), Hans
Rietman (Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
at Twente University of Technology in the Netherlands), Mark
Wiebes (Innovation Manager with the Dutch National Police),
Bryant Walker Smith (Assistant Professor of Law at the University
of South Carolina in the United States), and Jürgen Altmann
(Physicist and Peace Researcher at TU Dortmund University in
Germany). All these interviews have been conducted and written
by Gaston Dorren.
38 Just ordinAry robots
References
Aarts, E., & Marzano, S. (2003). e new everyday: Views on ambient intel-
ligence. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: 010 Publishers.
Arkin, R. C. (2009). Governing lethal in autonomous robots. Boca Raton, FL:
CRC Press.
Aron, J. (2011, September 6). Software tricks p eople into thinking it is human.
New Scientist Tech. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20865- soft
ware-tricks-people-into-thinking-it-is-human.html?DCMP=OTC-
rss&nsref=online-news (accessed October 26, 2014).
Asimov, I. (1950). I, Robot. New York: Gnome Press.
Böhle, K., Coenen, C., Decker, M., & Rader, M. (2011). Engineering of
intelligent artefacts. In R. van Est, & D. Stemerding (Eds.), Making
perfect life: Bio-Engineering in the 21st century (pp. 128–167). Brussels,
Belgium: European Parliament, STOA.
Brooks, R. A. (2002). Flesh and machines: How robots will change us. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Christensen, H. I. (Ed.). (2009). From Internet to robotics: A roadmap for U.S. robot-
ics. Snowbird, UT: Computing Community Consortium (CCC). www.us-
robotics.us/reports/CCC%20Report.pdf (accessed August 25, 2014).
Elliott, S. W. (2014). Anticipating a Luddite revival. Issues in Science and
Technology, 30(3), 27–36.
European Robotics Technology Platform (EUROP). (2009). Robotic visions
to 2020 and beyond: e strategic research agenda for robotics in Europe,
07/2009. Brussels, Belgium: European Robotics Technology Platform.
Floridi, L. (2014). e fourth revolution: How the infosphere is reshaping human
reality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Flusty, S. (2009). A review of “e McDonaldization of society 5”. Annals of
the Association of American Geographers, 99(2), 435–437.
Fong, T., Nourbakhsh, I., & Dautenhahn, K. (2003). A survey of socially
interactive robots. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 42(3–4), 143–166.
Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. A. (2013). e future of employment: How susceptible
are jobs to computerization? Oxford, UK: Oxford University Programme
on the Impacts of Future Technology.
Friedman, B., Kahn, Jr., P. H., & Borning, A. (2006). Value sensitive design
and information systems. In P. Zhang, & D. Galletta (Eds.), Human–
computer interaction and management information systems: Foundations
(pp. 248–372). New York: ME Sharpe.
Gates, B. (2007). A robot in every home. Scientic American Magazine, 296(1),
58–65.
Gorle, P., & Clive, A. (2013). Positive impact of industrial robots on employment:
Updated in January 2013 to take account of more recent data. London, UK:
Metra Martech/International Federation of Robotics (IFR).
Haworth, A. (2013, October 20). Why have young people in Japan stopped hav-
ing sex? e Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/
young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex (accessed January 23, 2014).
Joy, B. (2000). Why the future doesn’t need us. Wired, 8(4), 238–262.
39robots everywhere
Kahn, H., & Wiener, A. J. (1967). e year 2000: A framework for speculation
on the next thirty-three years. New York: e Macmillan Company.
Keim, B. (2009, April 2). Computer program self-discovers laws of physics.
Wired (online). http://www.wired.com/2009/04/newtonai.
Kroes, N. (2011). Commentary—Robots and other cognitive systems:
Challenges and European responses. Philosophy of Technology, 24(3),
355–357.
Kurzweil, R. (1990). The age of intelligent machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Kurzweil, R. (2005). e singularity is near: When humans transcend biology.
New York: Viking.
Labutov, I., Yosinski, J., & Lipson, H. (2011). YouTube-lm: “AI vs. AI: Two chat-
bots talking to each other”. www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY
(accessed September 4, 2014).
Lau, Y. Y., Van’t Hof, C., & Van Est, R. (2009). Beyond the surface. An explora-
tion in healthcare robotics in Japan. e Hague, the Netherlands: Rathenau
Institute.
Lipetz, B.-A. (1966). Information storage and retrieval. Scientic American,
215(3), 224–242.
Luck, M., McBurney, P., Shehory, O., & Willmott, S. (2005). Agent tech-
nology: Computing as interaction—A roadmap for agent based computing.
Southampton, England: Agentlink. http://agentlink.org/roadmap/index.
html (accessed October 5, 2014).
MacDorman, K. F., & Ishiguro, H. (2006). e uncanny advantage of using
androids in social and cognitive science research. Interaction Studies,
7(3), 297–337.
Minato, T., Shimada, M., Itakura, S., Lee, K., & Ishiguro H. (2006). Evaluating
the human likeness of an android by comparing gaze behaviors elicited by
the android and a person. Advanced Robotics, 20(10), 1147–1163.
Minsky, M. L. (Ed.). (1968). Semantic information processing. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Mitchell, J., Clarke, C., Shaer, J., Su, J., Chen, P., Kuroda, S., … Savaris,
B. (2012). Global industrial automation—Connection series. London, UK:
Credit Suisse.
Moor, J. H. (2006). e nature, importance, and diculty of machine ethics.
IEEE Intelligent Systems, 21(4), 18–21.
Moravec, H. (1988). Mind children: e future of robotics and human intelligence.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mori, M. (1970). (Translated by K. F. MacDorman, & T. Minato). e
uncanny valley. Energy, 7(4), 33–35.
Noble, D. F. (1997). e religion of technology: e divinity of man and the spirit
of invention. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Picard, R. W. (1995). Aective computing: MIT Media Laboratory Perceptual
Computing Section (Technical Report No. 321). Boston, MA: MIT.
Picard, R. W., & Klein, J. (2002). Computers that recognize and respond
to user emotion: eoretical and practical implications. Interacting with
Computers, 14(2), 141–169.
40 Just ordinAry robots
Pransky, J. (1996). Service robots: How should we dene them? Service Robot:
An International Journal, 2(1), 4–5.
Ravilious, K. (2009, April 2). First robot scientist makes gene discov-
ery. National Geographic News. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/
news/2009/04/090402-robot-scientists.html (accessed March 17, 2014).
Riskin, J. (2003). e defecating duck; or, the ambiguous origins of articial
life. Critical Inquiry, 29(4), 599–633.
Ritzer, G. (1983). e McDonaldization of society. Journal of American
Culture, 6(1), 100–107.
Ritzer, G. (2004). e McDonaldization of society. ousand Oaks, CA: Pine
Forge Press.
Sample, I., & Hern, A. (2014, June 9). Scientists dispute whether “Eugene
Goostman” passed Turing test. e Guardian. http://www.theguardian.
com/technology/2014/jun/09/scientists-disagree-over-whether-turing-
test-has-been-passed (accessed August 25, 2014).
Sandoval, L. (2014, April 16). Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talks ambient intel-
ligence, announces big data analytics platform. Tech Times. http://www.
techtimes.com/articles/5658/20140416/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-
talks-ambient-intelligence-announces-big-data-analytics- platform.htm
(accessed September 3, 2014).
Schuitema, E., Wisse, M., Ramakers, M. J. G., & Jonker, P. P. (2010). e
design of LEO: A 2d bipedal walking robot for online autonomous rein-
forcement learning. Proceedings of Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS
2010) (pp. 3238–3243). Taipei, Taiwan: IEEE.
Sharkey, A., & Sharkey, N. (2012). Granny and the robots: Ethical issues
in robot care for the elderly. Ethics and Information Technology, 14(1),
27–40.
Simon, H. A., & Newell, A. (1958). Heuristic problem solving: e next
advance in operations research. Operations Research, 6(1), 1–10.
Singer, P. W. (2009). Wired for war: e robotics revolution and conict in the
twenty-rst century. New York: e Penguin Press.
Steiner, C. (2012). Automate this: How algorithms came to rule the world. New
York: Portfolio/Penguin.
Trevelyan, J. (1999). Redening robotics for the next millennium. e International
Journal of Robotics Research, 18(12), 1211–1223.
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together. Why we expect more from technology and less
from each other. New York: Basic Books.
Umpleby, S. A. (2008). Cybernetics. In S. R. Clegg, & J. R. Bailey (Eds.),
International encyclopedia of organizational studies (pp. 350–354).
ousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Van’t Hof, C., Van Est, R., & Daemen, F. (Eds.). (2011). Check in/Check out:
e public space as an Internet of things. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: NAi
Publishers.
Van den Boogaard, A. (2010). Site-specic innovation: e design of kitch-
ens, oces, airports, and cities. In J. Schot, H. Lintsen & A. Rip (Eds.),
Technology and the making of the Netherlands: e age of contested modern-
ization, 1880–1970 (pp. 124–177). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.