Never to be Outdone

Apparently the French aren't the only latecomers to the robotic ethics debate, now the US Congress has decided the enter the mix. A “Congressional Caucus of Robotics” has been formed to investigate the situation. Right. Note the same Bill Gates quote about robotics found in EVERY SINGLE OTHER ARTICLE OF THIS TYPE... can’t these “journalists” find anything new to use?

via AAAI.org News

More on Ineffective, Unenforceable Guidelines

Apparently the "we need a code of robot ethics" meme just won’t die. As previously reported, the government of South Korea is hard at work drafting just such a code for robots and developers to follow. Nothing new here, just the same fear-mongering jargon, the same quote from Bill Gates and the same lack of discussion about the effectiveness and enforceability of the proposed guidelines. I guess the French media are just slow to catch on...

via AAAI.org News

Automated Annulments

Computers have made it easier for people to do lots of things. Soon, we may have to add getting a divorce to that list. Australian researchers are developing software designed to help mediate a divorce by combining AI, game theory and an external mediator. The goal is to provide a system to divide assets and decide other issues as fairly as possible.

Perhaps the potential clients should seek couples’ counseling from ELIZA instead...

via AAAI.org News

Overrated Semantic Search

Several IT news outlets have been fawning over Xerox's new semantic-based search engine, which I've covered before. The general idea behind the technology is to analyze linguistic structures in order to improve search results.

Xerox plans to use this technology in legal software to enable "e-discovery" by sifting through massive amounts of documents, searching for information relevant to a case. Perhaps this will lead to the second instance of software being sued for practicing law without a license.

This is all well and good, and a natural progression for the science of search. Not all that dramatic an improvement as the articles would lead us to believe, buy hey, you gotta sell papers, right? However, it aggravates me when the media makes a factual error while covering a topic I’m familiar with...

For example, common searches using keywords "Lincoln" and "vice president" likely won't reveal President Abraham Lincoln's first vice president. A semantic search should yield the answer: Hannibal Hamlin.

Except a Google search for “lincoln’s first vice president” provides the correct result, as does running “Who was Lincoln’s first vice president?” through my quite unsophisticated Answer Machine. While I can’t fault the reporter for overlooking my humble research, shouldn’t they be capable of running a simple Google query? Wouldn’t this fall under the category of “thorough fact checking?” Shouldn’t they run their “facts” through a subject matter expert before publishing them? And I mean an actual expert, not a PR staffer from the company at hand. Unfortunately, more and more tech articles in the media have regressed to little more than paraphrasing press releases.

Furthermore, if I notice obvious mistakes regarding topics I know a little something about, what other incorrect information am I obliviously consuming? And the media wonders why we don’t trust them anymore...

AI as a Moral Agent

The Ottawa Citizen takes a closer look at the ideology behind South Korea's initiative to draw up ethical guidelines to govern intelligent machines (as previously covered here). The article predictably examines the influence of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, but also dismisses the "hype" surrounding the proposals as much ado about nothing. The author correctly points out the weaknesses in the Three Laws, as relating to military and sentry applications of robotics. However, despite describing himself as an optimistic Luddite, he betrays an anthropocentric egoism that human intelligence will never be surpassed, therefore, these proposed guidelines will ultimately serve no purpose.

Robo-FUD from the BBC

The BBC generally has much better articles about AI than their latest piece about the questions posed by autonomous robots. Plenty of misplaced fear-mongering about the coming distopia with machine enslaving man, sprinkled with a bit of socialist concern for robots' rights to health care.

A single quote captures my feelings about this article rather succinctly:

"It's poorly informed, poorly supported by science and it is sensationalist," said Professor Owen Holland of the University of Essex.

The author is concerned with determining who to blame should an autonomous military robot kill someone in error. The proper answer, of course, would be the operator and/or chain of command, as appropriate. Additionally, just like any bit of military hardware, the defense contractor should also be investigated, and similar models inspected and re-tested.

Robotic rights are also addressed in this article, and again, another quote from a professor is needed to steer the discussion in the right direction:

"The more pressing and serious problem is the extent to which society is prepared to trust autonomous robots and entrust others into the care of autonomous robots."

We have a long way to go to counter Hollywood's negative portrayal of robots & AI, and it seems to me that most reporters are only interested in playing off of and propagating these sentiments. Certainly, there needs to be "informed debate" in order to give careful consideration about safeguards regarding human-machine interaction, but vacuous drivel such as this is not a good start.

Let the machines target machines - not people?

Not to be outdone by her allies, the US military has decided to draft some proposals regarding the proper use of robots and other autonomous systems in combat. The basic idea of the guidelines suggested by the Naval Surface Warfare Center is that machines should be allowed to freely engage other unmanned systems and weapons, but must require human interaction for permission to fire on enemy personnel manned systems. The researchers point to precedence of this concept in the automatic engaging protocols of the Patriot Missile Battery, Aegis Auto Special "hands-off" mode, and the Phalanx ship defense system.

An interesting suggestion, but it puts an awful lot of reliance on the autonomous systems' abilities to discriminate and positively identify the enemy, leaving allies unharmed. Many video game developers can't even get simple collision detection working. So while this may be an easier pill to swallow for those who criticize the "de-humanization" of warfare (giving lethal decision authority to a machine), those folks will be the loudest to complain as soon as the first error leads to a friendly fire incident. And, of course, all bets are off as soon as we face a symmetric adversary who's systems are not bound by these same guidelines. Overly-restrictive rules of engagement created by lawyers and politicians in the "ivory tower" can be quite the disadvantage for soldiers at the front lines in a shooting war.

(via Slashdot)

Laws to Govern Robots and AI

Several nations are proposing early legislation aimed at protecting the rights of humans and robots should AI researchers successfully produce sentient, conscious machines.

As part of a future-looking series of papers commissioned by the UK Office of Science and Innovation's Horizon Scanning Centre, developments over the next 50 years could lead to robots demanding the same rights as human beings. The study suggests that machines might be granted the both the rights & responsibilites of all Her Majesty's subjects, including voting, taxes, and military service.

South Korea is drafting an ethical code to regulate interaction between humans and robots. The rules are expected to set guidelines for robotic surgery, household servants, and human-robot "relationships." (via Slashdot)

The Government of Japan is also following suit, although its efforts appear to be mired in committee gibberish and red tape. Fears of conflict between man and machine, and civil servants seeking to avoid liability, seem to be the driving forces behind the draft proposal. Unlike the straightforward language of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, the Japanese rulebook contains wonderful bureaucratic poetry such as:

Risk shall be defined as a combination of the occurrence rate of danger and the actual level of danger. Risk estimation involves estimating the potential level of danger and evaluating the potential sources of danger. Therefore total risk is defined as the danger of use of robots and potential sources of danger.

Sounds like bloatware to me...

Let the Buyer Beware!

I came across an interesting news story today that made me think. Basically, some store in Canada accidentally sold a few copies of the new Harry Potter book more than a week before the official release date. Yawn. But what's interesting is that the book's distributor won a court injunction "barring the buyers of 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' from disclosing the plot." Additionally, the court ordered all copies be returned to the distributor.

This means that some poor Canadian child could have walked into his local bookstore and purchased a book he'd been waiting years for, but because the corporation behind the book decided it had been accidently sold a bit too early, a court of law decreed it must be returned and the little hoser has to keep his mouth shut about the storyline. I didn't know Canadian law granted merchants the right to refuse a transaction after the fact, or could restrict the freedom of speech to preserve marketing hype.

Could this be another step towards The Right to Read?