Ethical Robots Poised to Save the World?

There are some things in life that robots can do more effectively, with more precision than humans.

Take these little guys at Tesla who ensure the world never runs out of working pens.

Or this one, which provides the human race with the valuable skill of building things out of legos.

But a major shortcoming hailed by, well, people who complain about technology, is that robots replace human work minus the emotional-quality of being human.

But all of that may be changing thanks to the work of Susan and Michael Anderson, a husband and wife research team who have designed what could be the world’s first ethical robot.

The Andersons created a software program that obligates their robot to follow some simple moral imperatives–things like be just, do good, do not cause harm, keep a promise. The hope for the early model is that the robot will be able to assist in delivering patient medication. Using its programming, the robot will be able to deliver meds, assess the risk of a patient who fails to take them, and notify a doctor if the patient refuses medication.

Of course, based on the simple video below (which may not fully show off its capabilities), one has to wonder whether the not-so-ethical human could just lie to the robot? Yep, took the meds. Good stuff.

I’m thinking they’d better program some intuition into that robot too.

I like this couple’s hypothesis though.
I can buy that in some cases the world could be improved by ethical robots.

But there are hypotheses I like a whole lot better. Like that the world would be A LOT MORE IMPROVED if humans committed to acting ethically toward each other.

The problem, of course, is that we humans are historically a little more difficult to program than our robot equivalents.

But that doesn’t make it any less noble for us to adopt our techno-friends’ goals of being just, doing good, doing no harm and keeping our word. Who knows? Maybe we can show up these robots in a thing or two.