[Tyler]

Governing Lethal Behavior in Robots
     

A new technical report on the design of ethical autonomous military
robots comes
to us from an usual source, security expert Bruce
Schneier's blog. Coincidentally, Schneier just won the
Norbert
Wiener Award for outstanding contributions to social responsibility in
computing technology. The report in question is "Governing
Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive
Robot Architecture" (PDF format), from researchers at the Georgia Tech Mobile Robot
Lab. A formalized ethical representation and control structure is
described. Readers may also be interested in a more recent publication
from Georgia Tech, "Lethality
and Autonomous Systems: Survey Design and Results" (PDF format), a
survey of the general public, military, roboticists, and policy makers
on ethical issues of autonomous military robots. The results show that
most people believe human soldiers should be held responsible for their
lethal mistakes. However, when an autonomous robot makes a lethal
mistake, no one seems to know who to blame. Many blame military
commanders, politicians, and
roboticists, with only a few blaming the robot itself.
Those surveyed also felt that military robots should be designed to feel
sympathy and guilt but not anger.
   

http://robots.net/article/2456.html