Insight. Applied.
In his recent keynote Google CEO Sundar Pichai said
In fact, when I look at where computing is headed, it’s clear to me that we are evolving from a mobile-first to an AI-first world.
Devices like Amazon’s Echo and Google Home are “always-on” intelligent assistants designed to sit quietly and await our bidding.
As the devices recede into the background it’s the AI-powered services that will come to the fore.
The first death in a self-driving car occurred in May 2016. It was in a Tesla Model S travelling along a Florida highway.
Apparently the car’s Autopilot system got confused by a white truck against a bright sky and failed to brake. When AI systems fail, they sometimes fail big.
Tesla noted in a press release this is the first fatality in 130 million miles, compared to an average of one fatality per 94 million miles of regular driving. While those numbers are on the right side, they don’t seem high enough to convince people to give up control.
Of course, this is both a technological progress and a systems problem. AI in cars is only going to get better. And, as we have more self-driving cars on the road, their predictability, and ability to communicate their intentions, should lead to quantum leaps in safety. Of course there’s always the fear of a system-wide failure that would result in the worst pileup in history.
What I found strange was another point Tesla made in the press release—that the self-driving feature is in beta and only designed to be semi-autonomous. Their definition of semi-autonomous is that you need to keep your hands on the steering wheel. That would seem to suggest that all their customers have been recruited as testers on public roads! Sitting with my hands on the steering wheel while my car drives would, I think, dull my reaction times to an unsafe level.
There’s an international coalition that is
[…] working to preemptively ban fully autonomous weapons.
To be clear, this isn’t the type of robot used to kill a sniper recently. We are talking about systems designed to make a kill decision without human intervention.
What really drew my attention to the (serious) campaign, however, was the name—Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. If only all marketing was as snappy.
I noticed some headlines in the last few days about the “unprecedented” use of a robot to kill a person. At first, I was worried that, as we prepare to have robots move among us, one of our faithful servants had already broken Asimov’s first law of robotics
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
However, it turns out that the Dallas Police Department used a bomb-disposal robot to transport a bomb into the vicinity of a sniper and then remotely detonate it. That seems more like novel use of a radio-controlled car than deployment of morally ambiguous cutting-edge machine intelligence.
Seems like “killer robots” are all the rage now.
ScienceDaily has an interesting article on the moral dilemmas that could face autonomous cars.
Iyad Rahwan of MIT’s Media Lab surveyed people on how safety rules should be programmed in these cars. People generally held a utilitarian view. For example, in a situation where a car could either career into a group of schoolchildren or smash into a wall, killing it’s occupants, most people believed it should do the latter. More lives are saved.
However, there’s a tragedy of the commons hiding behind this socially responsible facade. When asked if they would actually purchase a car that was programmed to act in this manner most people said “No.”
So basically promote the common good as long as I’m not at risk.
Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics offer little guidance here, as they deal in absolutes rather than trade-offs. And it’s the trade-offs that generally provide us with the thorniest dilemmas.
Self-driving cars represent an early attempt to place hordes of robots in regular, direct contact with the general public. Until now, we’ve largely confined them to factories…or space…or used them in highly specialized environments (e.g. military operations). As robots start to move among us these ethical dilemmas will become increasingly significant.