This Takes the Cake

Ten abstract laws, combined in code, patented.

Anybody else finding that whenever you hear anything from
"ethicists" these days, you're disgusted with what they're doing?


Seth


> http://www.itworldcanada.com/Pages/Docbase/ViewArticle.aspx?ID=idgml-4b6e7ba7-0ecc-47b8-8bd4-7c7baa29be4a


Ethical artificial intelligence patented

Robots to follow 10 mandates that focus on virtues, exclude vices


By: ComputerWorld Canada staff
ComputerWorld Canada  (20 Aug 2004) 


As movie-goers flock to the theatres to see the recently-released
futuristic thriller I, Robot, ethical behaviour in artificial
intelligence (AI) is getting a boost with a new patent issued
last month by the U.S Patent and Trademark Office. 

The patent, Inductive Inference Affective Language Analyzer
Simulating AI (# 6,587,846) introduces the concept of the Ten
Ethical Laws of Robotics. According to a statement from inventor
John LaMuth, the patent represents “the first AI system
incorporating ethical/motivational terms, enabling a computer to
reason and speak ethically, serving in roles specifying sound
human judgment.” 

The Ten Ethical Laws expand upon Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of
Robotics, an idea found in his book, I, Robot, published in 1950,
which this summer’s movie is based upon. The movie is set in
Chicago in the year 2035, where robots are part of everyday life
and everyone trusts them, except one slightly paranoid detective
(played by Will Smith). He investigates what he alone believes is
a crime perpetrated by a robot. The case leads him to discover a
far more frightening threat to the human race. 

Asimov’s laws state that a robot may not injure a human or,
through inaction, allow a human to come to harm; it must obey
orders humans give it except where such orders would conflict
with the first law; and it must protect its own existence as long
as such protection does not conflict with the first or second
law. 

According to LaMuth’s statement, Asimov’s laws don’t quite cut
it. “This cursory system of safeguards…remains simplistic in its
dictates, leaving open the specific details for implementing such
a system.” But the Ten Ethical Laws remedy that shortcoming, he
said, because they are written as a “formal mandate,” focusing on
virtues to the necessary exclusion of corresponding vices. 

“With such ethical safeguards firmly in place, the AI computer is
formally prohibited from expressing the corresponding vices,
allowing for a truly flawless simulation of virtue,” according to
the statement. 


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