Listening to: Dinosaur Adventure 3D - Underworld

The South Koreans are putting together a Robot Ethics Charter:

An ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa, is being drawn up by South Korea.

The Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for users and manufacturers and will be released later in 2007.

…

The new guidelines could reflect the three laws of robotics put forward by author Isaac Asimov in his short story Runaround in 1942, she said.

Asimov’s three laws are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Later stories saw the introduction of the Zeroth Law:

“A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”

For me this is really interesting because it is an example of the sorts of ideas put forward by Bill Joy many years ago. Poo-poo’d at the time I am very confident that these are ideas that will gain a lot more currency - not taking responsibility has been shown to be a failed business strategy (when judged on metrics like longevity and sustainability).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Human Rights, Robots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.