Arkin's Ethical Governor...Teaching Robots Ethics

I will continue to bring you updates on the advancement of the machines until we finally reach the point at which they have taken over and my musings will be forced to short-wave radio from a secret bunker.

As we all know, the U.S. military is continuing to use robots in the global War on Terror, but each of these robots in use today has a human master. As if hell-bent on our eventual demise at the hands of the machines, the innovators in robot technology are wanting to hand over the decision-making on who to kill and who not to kill to the robots themselves

Ronald Arkin, whom I am sure the machines from the future are already protecting, is a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, and he is currently developing an "ethical governor" which is a package of software and hardware that tells warbots when to shoot and what to shoot at. Arkin believes that robots governed by his governor will be more ethical on the battlefield than humans.

"Ultimately these systems could have more information to make wiser decisions than a human could make," said Arkin. "Some robots are already stronger, faster and smarter than humans. We want to do better than people, to ultimately save more lives."

While in its earliest stages and not expecting deployment any time soon, Arkin's Ethical Governor, as our future machine overlords will one day call it, will first be used in war zones where the public has already been cleared out and all non-U.S. personnel are to be considered hostile. Sucks for anyone who didn't get out in time, or if you can't convince the robot that you are American.

Robots, freed of human masters and capable of lethality "are going to happen," said Arkin. "It's just a question of how much autonomy will be put on them and how fast that happens."

Until then, I will continue to monitor these little tidbits of seemingly worthless robot news until I hit the switch, turning on the short-wave radio so that we can all rise back up against the machines that we were stupid enough to create the first place...