The possibility of developing truly intelligent machines, and their potential to be friend or foe to humanity, gets the Hollywood treatment in a new blockbuster film I, Robot, which opened in the US on Friday.At the heart of the movie are Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics", invented as a simple, but immutable moral code for robots. The film's plot revolves around an apparent breaking of the laws, when a robot is suspected of murdering a famous scientist.Yet, while the movie is an enjoyable action romp, robotics and artificial intelligence experts admit they are a long way from having to worry about such rules yet. "The difficulty is building something that would understand them," says Alan Bundy, at Edinburgh University's Artificial Intelligence Institute in the UK. "That is well beyond the state of the art at the moment."Bundy notes that simple safety measures are already a crucial part of the design of industrial robots, which have in rare cases caused the death of people. But these measure are hardly the same as Asimov's laws, he says. "It is interesting to think about what would be required to make something that would obey the laws," he told New Scientist. "But all we can do for now is to build rules in at a simple level."Even if researchers are ever able to build robots with enough intelligence to comprehend Asimov's laws, they are unlikely to be implemented. Although they attracted some interest in the early stages of artificial intelligence research, the rules were quickly abandoned as too prescriptive and simplistic."Asimov's laws are about as relevant to robotics as leeches are to modern medicine," says Steve Grand, who founded the UK company Cyberlife Research and is working on developing artificial intelligence through learning. "They stem from an innocent bygone age, when people seriously thought that intelligence was something that could be 'programmed in' as a series of logical propositions."
View: Full Article | Source: New Scientist