TEXT D In 1981 Kenji Urada, a
37-year-old Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki
plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to
switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot’s powerful
hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a
grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the
hands of a robot. This astounding industrial accident would not
have happened in a world in which robot behavior was governed by the Three Laws
of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science fiction writer. The laws
appeared in 1, Robot, a book of short stories published in 1950 that inspired a
Hollywood film. But decades later the laws, designed to prevent robots from
harming people either through action or inaction, remain in the realm of
fiction. With robots now poised to emerge from their industrial
cages and to move into homes and workplaces, roboticists are concerned about the
safety implications beyond the factory floor. To address these concerns, leading
robot experts have come together to try to find ways to prevent robots from
harming people. "Security, safety and sex are the big concerns," says Henrik
Christensen, chairman of the European Robotics Network at the Swedish Royal
Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and one of the organisers of the new
roboethics group. Should robots that are strong enough or heavy enough to crush
people be allowed into homes Should robotic sex dolls resembling children be
legally allowed These questions may seem esoteric but in the
next few years they will become increasingly relevant, says Dr. Christensen.
According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s World Robotics
Survey, in 2002 the number of domestic and service robots more than tripled,
nearly outstripping their industrial counterparts. Japanese industrial firms are
racing to build humanoid robots to act as domestic helpers for the elderly, and
South Korea has set a goal that 100% of households should have domestic robots
by 2020. In light of all this, it is crucial that we start to think about safety
and ethical guidelines now, says Dr. Christensen. So what
exactly is being done to protect us from these mechanical menaces "Not enough,"
says Blay Whitby, an artificial-intelligence expert at the University of Sussex
in England. This is hardly surprising given that the field of "safety-critical
computing" is barely a decade old, he says. But things are changing, and
researchers are increasingly taking an interest in trying to make robots safer.
One approach, which sounds simple enough, is to try to program them to avoid
contact with people altogether. But this is much harder than it sounds. Getting
a robot to navigate across a cluttered room is difficult enough without having
to take into account what its various limbs or appendages might bump into along
the way. Regulating the behavior of robots is going to become
more difficult in the future, since they will increasingly have self-learning
mechanisms built into them, says Gianmarco Veruggio, a roboticist at the
Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, Italy. As a result,
their behavior will become impossible to predict fully, he says, since they will
not be behaving in predefined ways but will learn new behavior as they
go. The word "astounding" in the second paragraph is closest in meaning to ______.