Killer robotsRobotics Researchers Have a Duty to Prevent Autonomous Weapons
Robotics is rapidly being transformed by advances in artificial intelligence, and the benefits are widespread. But our ever-growing appetite for intelligent, autonomous machines poses a host of ethical challenges.
Robotics is rapidly being transformed by advances in artificial intelligence. And the benefits are widespread: We are seeing safer vehicles with the ability to automatically brake in an emergency, robotic arms transforming factory lines that were once offshored and new robots that can do everything from shop for groceries to deliver prescription drugs to people who have trouble doing it themselves.
But our ever-growing appetite for intelligent, autonomous machines poses a host of ethical challenges.
Rapid Advances Have Led Ethical Dilemmas
These ideas and more were swirling as my colleagues and I met in early November at one of the world’s largest autonomous robotics-focused research conferences – the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. There, academics, corporate researchers, and government scientists presented developments in algorithms that allow robots to make their own decisions.
As with all technology, the range of future uses for our research is difficult to imagine. It’s even more challenging to forecast given how quickly this field is changing. Take, for example, the ability for a computer to identify objects in an image: in 2010, the state of the art was successful only about half of the time, and it was stuck there for years. Today, though, the best algorithms as shown in published papers are now at 86 percent accuracy. That advance alone allows autonomous robots to understand what they are seeing through the camera lenses. It also shows the rapid pace of progress over the past decade due to developments in AI.
This kind of improvement is a true milestone from a technical perspective. Whereas in the past manually reviewing troves of video footage would require an incredible number of hours, now such data can be rapidly and accurately parsed by a computer program.
But it also gives rise to an ethical dilemma. In removing humans from the process, the assumptions that underpin the decisions related to privacy and security have been fundamentally altered. For example, the use of cameras in public streets may have raised privacy concerns 15 or 20 years ago, but adding accurate facial recognition technology dramatically alters those privacy implications.
