The Ethics of Robotics

The three laws of Robotics first appeared together in Isaac Asimov's story 'Runaround' after being mentioned in some form or the other in previous works by Asimov. These three laws commonly known as the three laws of robotics are the earliest forms of depiction for the needs of ethics in Robotics. In simplistic language Isaac Asimov is able to explain what rules a robot must confine itself to in order to maintain societal sanctity. However, even though they are outdated they still represent some of our innate fears which are beginning to resurface in present day 21st Century. Our society is on the advent of a new revolution; a revolution led by advances in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence & Nanotechnology. Some of our advances have been so phenomenal that we surpassed what was predicted by the Moore's law. With these advancements comes the fear that our future may be at the mercy of these androids. Humans today are scared that we, ourselves, might create something which we cannot control. We may end up creating something which can not only learn much faster than anyone of us can, but also evolve faster than what the theory of evolution has allowed us to. The greatest fear is not only that we might lose our jobs to these intelligent beings, but that these beings might end up replacing us at the top of the cycle. The public hysteria has been heightened more so by a number of cultural works which depict annihilation of the human race by robots. Right from Frankenstein to I, Robot mass media has also depicted such issues. This paper is an effort to understand the need for ethics in Robotics or simply termed as Roboethics. This is achieved by the study of artificial beings and the thought being put behind them. By the end of the paper, however, it is concluded that there isn't a need for ethical robots but more so ever a need for ethical roboticists.

To study the phenomenon of the Moravec's Paradox

"Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much powerful, though usually unconscious, sensor motor knowledge. We are all prodigious Olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it."- Hans Moravec Moravec's paradox is involved with the fact that it is the seemingly easier day to day problems that are harder to implement in a machine, than the seemingly complicated logic based problems of today. The results prove that most artificially intelligent machines are as adept if not more than us at under-taking long calculations or even play chess, but their logic brings them nowhere when it comes to carrying out everyday tasks like walking, facial gesture recognition or speech recognition.