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 opens in the US on Friday.
At the heart of the movie are Isaac Asimov鈥檚 鈥淭hree Laws of Robotics鈥�, invented as a simple, but immutable moral code for robots [See below]. The film鈥檚 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. 鈥淭he difficulty is building something that would understand them,鈥� says Alan Bundy, at Edinburgh University鈥檚 Artificial Intelligence Institute in the UK. 鈥淭hat is well beyond the state of the art at the moment.鈥�
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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鈥檚 laws, he says.
鈥淚t is interesting to think about what would be required to make something that would obey the laws,鈥� he told 快猫短视频. 鈥淏ut all we can do for now is to build rules in at a simple level.鈥�
Programmed intelligence
Even if researchers are ever able to build robots with enough intelligence to comprehend Asimov鈥檚 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.
鈥淎simov鈥檚 laws are about as relevant to robotics as leeches are to modern medicine,鈥� says Steve Grand, who founded the UK company Cyberlife Research and is working on developing artificial intelligence through learning. 鈥淭hey stem from an innocent bygone age, when people seriously thought that intelligence was something that could be 鈥榩rogrammed in鈥� as a series of logical propositions.鈥�
The key problem, Grand says, is that the basic operating principles of the human brain 鈥� the only model for advanced intelligence that we have 鈥� are not well understood. There are currently many theories and possible approaches to generating artificial intelligence, and Bundy warns that the field remains hideously fragmented for now.
One way to create thinking robots, which is being championed by Grand and others, may be through teaching. Grand is experimenting by teaching a simple robot, called Lucy, and hopes that robots could one day develop complex intelligence by mimicking the way humans learn.
鈥淭hey鈥檒l just have to learn the difference between right and wrong, like the rest of us,鈥� he told 快猫短视频. 鈥淚鈥檓 confident we鈥檒l get there, but I think it鈥檒l happen in a series of sudden, unpredictable lurches, not a steady progression.鈥�
Asimov鈥檚 Three Rules of Robots:
1 鈥� A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2 鈥� A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3 鈥� A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
(Asimov eventually added a fourth law that required robots to protect humanity as a whole)