ISAAC ASIMOV WAS wrong to think that the laws of robotics would be hard-wired into every robot brain. He was right, though, to think that robots would need regulation, and that such regulation would cause heated debate on the role that they might play.In many of the areas touched on by this special report, laws and regulations will be crucial to the way that markets for robots develop. The uptake of industrial robots has always been constrained by health-and-safety considerations. Autonomy for lethal military robots remains a serious concern, soon to be discussed at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva. The spread of civilian drones will depend on freeing up airspace, along with bandwidth for their control. The advent of self-driving cars opens up all sorts of legal and regulatory issues.As Mr Gupta of the NSF points out, manufacturers’ technical ability to produce robots that can help in the home might easily outrun their capacity to deal with the resulting liability issues, especially if the robots operate in the homes of elderly people with cognitive difficulties. Sweet little Paro, rated as a consumer product in some places, is regulated in...
from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/1rFKhDZ
No comments:
Post a Comment