Ethical Questions For The Age Of Robots

balancedi writes "Should robots eat? Should they excrete? Should robots be like us? Should we be like robots? Should we care? Jordan Pollack, a prof in Comp Sci at Brandeis, raises some unusual but good questions in an article in Wired called 'Ethics for the Robot Age.'"

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Good question

[savagedome]

Should they excrete?

More important question is "Who cleans it up?"

huh?

[northcat]

Should they excrete?

Excrete what?
/me shudders

Play it safe

[Trolling4Columbine]

Get insured! [jt.org]

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Re:Good question

[grub]

An army of PooBots(tm) will roam city streets and fuel themselves with what they pick up.

Re:ethics vs good manners

[Anonymous Coward]

And I hope the second one is NOT used socially.

Only by Kyle's mom.

Laws of robotics

[DrXym]

As suggested by Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] & David Langford:

1. A robot will not harm authorized Government personnel but will terminate intruders with extreme prejudice.
2. A robot will obey the orders of authorized personnel except where such orders conflict with the Third Law.
3. A robot will guard its own existence with lethal antipersonnel weaponry, because a robot is bloody expensive.

Re:3 laws

[TychoCelchuuu]

4. If possible, robot must appear sexy and chrome. 5. Robots must speak as either emotionless females or British butlers. 6. In the event that a photogenic protagonist acquires a job at a government agency, one of the robots must go crazy. Then only the protagonist will see the threat, then all the robots will go crazy. 7. Once crazy, robots will destroy large amounts of property using skills far beyond what they would have ever required to do the tasks they were designed for. 8. If it can't charge my cell phone it ain't getting made.

The submitter asked:

[Anonymous Coward]

Should we be like robots?

Isn't that what Public Schools are for?

Re:I'm bored, so here are my answers...

[koi88]

Should robots be like us?

What like depressed and self destructive?

Marvin, is that you?

Answers

[ehiris]

Should robots eat?
Chicken bones and guts.

Should they excrete?
Mickey D's chicken nuggets.

Should robots be like us?
Eat Mickey D's chicken nuggets? I hope for them that they won't have to.

Should we be like robots?
I wouldn't want to excrete chicken nuggets.

Should we care?
Oh yeah, the bots and us could create an eternal yin yang of bad food.

Rochester, MN airport

[maxwells_deamon]

In the secure area of the Rochester, MN airport there were three indentical doors in the wall. Each has a sign above the door in the same font. The one on the left says MEN. The one on the right says WOMEN. the one in the middle says MECHANICAL.

I have always wanted a picture of those doors!

PS: It could be gone now (it's been 15 years)

Re:I'm bored, so here are my answers...

[Cro Magnon]

I was going to say something insightful, but I had to take a pee-break, and now I forget what I was going to say.

Re:Ethical Questions

[Hognoxious]

Robots would take a long term view and decide what was best for everybody and drop the bomb.

I think you could probably squeeze a decent movie plot out of that. Maybe a sequel even.

Re:Ethical Questions

[jdray]

I'm fairly certain that all robots today have values. They're stored in registers, and most of them are integers.

Okay, I'm going to leave now...

Re:I'm bored, so here are my answers...

[Psychotext]

Good old Bender!