Robot ethics

As any true science fiction geek is aware, robots must have laws to govern their behaviour.

The law of robotics was a theory created by Isaac Asimov, who was fascinated by the concept of machines who could look like, act like and eventually improve upon their creators.

There are four laws the robot must follow: it may not cause harm to humanity or allow harm to come to humanity through inaction; it may not cause harm to a person or allow harm to come to a person through inaction; it must obey orders given by people, unless those orders conflict with the first two laws; and it must protect its own existence, so long as that does not conflict with the first three laws.

Asimov worried about something many scientific ethicists fret over: in our quest to create something real from the depths of our imaginations, we can go horribly wrong. This is not a needless fear. Human beings have a track record of using well-intentioned science to create things that have caused terrible destruction.

Memories of Hiroshima are scarcely fading as governments scramble to prevent Iran from developing the technology it would need to build a nuclear weapon.

Perhaps these laws, though developed as a basis for ethics in robotics, should be considered in the creation of any machine, whether it is a product of the ingenuity of engineers or the carefully constructed bureaucracy of layers upon layers of democratic governance.

After all, with all the rules that govern the public service, it often feels as if they were created in order to protect the machine itself rather than the people and society it was intended to serve.

Children who go to school are put into an institution intended to assist children in their transition into adulthood. A system like that should be built not only to foster an understanding of the responsibilities and complexities that come along with growing up, but also to develop an idea of what kind of adult each child can become.

Instead, children may spend entire school terms preparing for a test with content that means little in that context. It will do nothing more that prove each institution’s worth as an institution, not taking into account the wellbeing of its users.

Refugees fleeing life-threatening situations around the world rely on the help they get when they arrive in Canada. The decision to pull back funding from the refugee system may curry favour with voters, but it leaves those people with no access to medical care, and sometimes locked in detention centres for months.

For years now, low income families have had money withheld from them because of a computer error. The police response to international demand for an inquest into missing aboriginal women was to spit out an unhelpful statistic. Locally, the County’s only hospital nearly lost funding elegiblity because of a geographical miscalculation.

When a machine that was created for a specific purpose fails, it must be repaired or replaced. Our system isn’t perfect. If it needs to be repaired, it might be worth applying those ethical laws: the public service should protect people from harm before protecting itself.

mihal@mihalzada.com