Ethics
Roboethics On the Minds of Academics
It seems that academics are so convinced that robots will be our peers in society that they keep ringing alarm bells about their ethical programming. Mark Harris gives us another data point.
27Dec2008 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
Robotic Babysitters?
It’s hard to think about ethics in robots these days and it’s a touchy subject for me–especially in military contexts; however, Brandon Keim’s great article at Wired.com made me realize that it might make sense to start thinking about non-military roboethics sooner rather than later.
27Dec2008 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
They’re Here
This week, an attack by robots crippled a local business. The destruction made it impossible for customers to enter the attraction-based establishment. What’s worse, the robots systematically replaced revenue-generating advertisements with very inappropriate ones.
The business was forced to shut down while it fixed the wreckage and replaced the ads. Only time will tell [...]
Artificial Companion Mitigates Alzheimer’s
Paro Robots U.S., Inc. will be distributing Japan’s Intelligent Systems’ artificial life form Paro in the US and Canada. Modeled after a baby harp seal, it is designed to provide therapeutic services to patients with Alzheimer’s disease, other forms of dementia, and emotional complications stemming from the prolonged recovery associated with severe injury [...]
22Apr2008 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
Formal Study and Military Anecdotes Observe Human-Robot Attachment
When I discovered Joel Garreau’s article Bots on the Ground, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. He described a scenario where a new kind of military robot was being demonstrated to an Army colonel. The robot was long and segmented with many legs and designed to step on and trigger land mines. It was [...]
3Oct2007 | Ray Renteria | 2 comments | Continued
OP ED: U.S. Working to Render its Own Military Robots Impotent
This article started out an effort to dig into the interesting and sociological ramifications of developing and embedding a conscience into robots as Ronald Arkin of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing is working to do. I read article after article in order to find and stitch together the technology thread. Instead I [...]
2Oct2007 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
Revising Asimov’s Three Laws
J. Storrs Hall is a noted scientist and author. He is chief scientist at Nanorex and has published extensively on the subject. His most recent book is titled Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine (2007).
Hall spoke at The Singularity Summit this morning on the topic of revising Asimov’s Three Laws of [...]
[Exclusive] Rodney Brooks Keynote at Singularity Summit
The Singularity Summit is a two day event happening this weekend in San Francisco. The event is being hosted by SIAI, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. This event is follow-on to last year’s Singularity Summit 1 conducted at Stanford.
Keynoting the event this morning was Rodney Brooks , of CSAIL and iRobot fame. [...]
Harvard Makes Progress on “Biohybrid Materials for Soft Robotics”
A team of scientists in the Disease Biophysics Group at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has been working on interfacing biological material such as heart muscle tissue with man-made polymers. The team has figured out how to grow muscle tissue in a structured way so as to be able to begin [...]
7Sep2007 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
Fear The Reaper
With 3750 lbs of armaments, a top speed of 300 mph, and the ability to circle the battlefield at 50,000 ft and stay aloft for 16 hours, the new squadron of Reaper unmanned aircraft recently deployed to Afghanistan unleash a new breed of hell on the conflict. As reported in USA Today and [...]
29Aug2007 | Jonas Lamis | 0 comments | Continued