Ethics Newsline®

SEOUL
Scientists are beginning to plan for ethical dilemmas instigated by human abuse of increasingly “intelligent” robots.

The BBC reports that rapid advances in robotics are prompting serious debate over the issue, with a panel in South Korea drawing up an ethical code to prevent humans from abusing robots and vice-versa.

A report from the CBC notes that South Korean robot scientist Park Hye-Young envisions scenarios that require some ethical forethought. “Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives,” she said. “Others may get addicted to interacting with them just as many Internet users get hooked to the cyberworld.”

As the London Daily Telegraph reports, the code of ethics is likely to be modeled after the principles stated in science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s work, I Robot. Telegraph Asia correspondent Richard Spencer writes that Asimov’s guidelines were a “sort of Hippocratic oath for androids: they were not allowed to harm humans, or allow them to come to harm through inaction; they had to obey orders; and they had to protect themselves if that did not compromise the first two instructions.”

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports that many scientists feel the ethics code is not that far-fetched. Futurist Damian Conway told the ABC, “It’s quite likely that robots will develop some form of intelligence. It may even be to the level of some kind of self-awareness. Now at that point they become creatures with which we have to have an ethical kind of relationship.”

“Now, you can leave that until that happens,” Conway warned, “but then the history of legislation is that it always follows very far behind the actual technologies that it’s trying to legislate. And in the gap between what is considered to be right or lawful or appropriate, and what is possible, you have the room for all kinds of abuses.”