[Tyler]

Asimov's Laws of Robotics Revisited
     

Yes, we know there are really four laws, not three. Yes, we know
Asimov intended the laws to intentionally produce logical conflicts and
interesting stories. Still, any time you get a lot of scientists
together to discuss robots and ethics, Asimov's Laws
of Robotics come up. And, as pointed
out in Wired's Gadget Lab today, the latest paper on robot ethics is
no exception. The paper is  Toward
the Human-Robot Co-Existence Soceity: On Safety Intelligence for Next
Generation Robots (PDF format). The authors, Yueh-Hsuan Weng,
Chien-Hsun Chen, and Chuen-Tsai Sun do understand what Asimov intended
and do not take his laws as a serious basis for robot ethics. But they
make some interesting observations about them anyway such as pointing
out they are fundamentally unethical:
by Warren’s definition the robots with Human-Based
Intelligence could be seen with moral standings,
and it’s immoral to force robots with Human-Based Intelligence to obey
Asimov’s [second law] to ”serve people” such as Ian Kerr said
earlier. As [for] the robots without moral standings, Anderson introduced
Immanuel Kant’s consideration that ”humans should not mistreat the
entity in question, even though it lacked rights itself”, he argued that
even though animals lack moral standing and can be used to serve the end
of human beings, we should still not mistreat them [also allowed under
the second law].

Aside from the paper's take on Asimov's laws, it goes on to address
the more serious real world questions presented by both hypothetical
conscious,
autonomous robot of the future as well as by today's simple automated
robots. They
discuss whether any robot today or in the future could be given a
formalized system of moral values. They also address the question of how to
create a legal structure to handle ethical issues arising from
human-robot interaction.
   

http://robots.net/article/2885.html