首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Trust Me, I Am a Robot Robot safety: as robots move into homes and offices, ensuring that they do not injure people will be
Trust Me, I Am a Robot Robot safety: as robots move into homes and offices, ensuring that they do not injure people will be
admin
2013-02-24
62
问题
Trust Me, I Am a Robot
Robot safety: as robots move into homes and offices, ensuring that they do not injure people will be vital. But how?
The incident
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 gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behaviour was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction writer. The laws appeared in I, Robot, a book of short stories published in 1950 that inspired a recent 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.
Indeed, despite the introduction of improved safety mechanisms, robots have claimed many more victims since 198 I. Over the years people have been crushed, hit on the head, welded and even had molten aluminium poured over them by robots. Last year there were 77 robot-related accidents in Britain alone, according to the Health and Safety Executive.
More related issues
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. Inspired by the Pugwash Conferences--an international group of scientists, academics and activists founded in 1957 to campaign for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons—the new group of robo-ethicists met earlier this year in Genoa, Italy, and announced their initial findings in March at the European Robotics Symposium in Palermo, Sicily.
"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 robo-ethics group. Should robots that are strong enough or heavy enough to crush people be allowed into homes? Is "system malfunction" a justifiable defence for a robotic fighter plane that contravenes the Geneva Convention and mistakenly fires on innocent civilians? And 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 surpassing their industrial counterparts. By the end of 2003 there were more than 600,000 robot vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers — a figure predicted to rise to more than 4m by the end of next year. 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.
Difficulties
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.
Regulating the behaviour 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 in Italy. As a result, their behaviour will become impossible to predict fully, he says, since they will not be behaving in predefined ways but will learn new behaviour as they go.
Then there is the question of unpredictable failures. What happens if a robot’s motors stop working, or it suffers a system failure just as it is performing heart surgery or handing you a cup of hot coffee? You can, of course, build in redundancy by adding backup systems, says Hirochika Inoue, a veteran roboticist at the University of Tokyo who is now an adviser to the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. But this guarantees nothing, he says. "One hundred percent safety is impossible through technology," says Dr. Inoue. This is because ultimately no matter how thorough you are, you cannot anticipate the unpredictable nature of human behaviour, he says.
Legal problems
So where does this leave Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics? They were a narrative device, and were never actually meant to work in the real world, says Dr. Whitby. Let alone the fact that the laws require the robot to have some form of human-like intelligence, which robots still lack, the laws themselves don’t actually work very well. Indeed, Asimov repeatedly knocked them down in his robot stories, showing time and again how these seemingly watertight roles could produce unintended consequences.
In any case, says Dr. Inoue, the laws really just encapsulate commonsense principles that are already applied to the design of most modem appliances, both domestic and industrial. Every toaster, lawn mower and mobile phone is designed to minimise the risk of causing injury — yet people still manage to electrocute themselves, lose fingers or fall out of windows in an effort to get a better signal. At the very least, robots must meet the rigorous safety standards that cover existing products~ The question is whether new, robot-specific rules are needed-- and, if so, what they should say.
"Making sure robots are safe will be critical," says Colin Angle of Robot, which has sold over 2m "Roomba" household-vacuuming robots. But be argues that his firm’s robots are, in fact, much safer than some popular toys. But what he believes is that robot is just like other home appliances that deserves no special treatment.
Robot safety is likely to appear in the civil courts as a matter of product liability. "When the first robot carpet-sweeper sucks up a baby, who will be to blame?" asks John Hallam, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. If a robot is autonomous and capable of learning, can its designer be held responsible for all its actions? Today the answer to these questions is generally "yes". But as robots grow in complexity it will become a lot less clear cut, he says.
However, the idea that general-purpose robots, capable of learning, will become widespread is wrong, suggests Mr. Angle. It is more likely, he believes, that robots will be relatively dumb machines designed for particular tasks. Rather than a humanoid robot maid, "it’ s going to be a heterogeneous swarm of robots that will take care of the house," he says.
As Henrik Christensen pointed out, three big concerns related to robots were security, safety, and sex.
选项
A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案
A
解析
根据人名定位第二部分的第二段,叙述符合文章的内容
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/DMu7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
A、Heartdisease.B、Severeheadache.C、Heatstress.D、Musclepain.C本题询问与炎热天气相关的健康问题是什么。短文讲述炎热天气的危害及其应对方法后,明确提出与炎热灭气相关的健康问题是热压力,故
iPadDominatesDuetoApple’sSuppleDealsApplecertainlyhaslotsofsecretweaponsbehinditsproducts,butthere’sahid
Sherushedintotheclassroom,______(抱着一个大纸箱).
Sharingonline,associalmediaenthusiastsarelearning,canhaveallsortsofunintendedconsequencesoffline.NowFaceboo
Sharingonline,associalmediaenthusiastsarelearning,canhaveallsortsofunintendedconsequencesoffline.NowFaceboo
Becausesomanypeopleintheirteensandearly20sareincreasinglysocializing—accessibletoeachothereveryminuteoftheda
Tourismreallyisabigbusinessthesedays.It’s【B1】______.Itinvolveshotels,transportation,【B2】______,shops,andthousands
Oneinsix.Believeitornot,that’sthenumberofAmericanswhostrugglewithhunger.Tomaketomorrowalittlebetter,Feedin
A、Itwasfamousforitsfilmindustry.B、ItbecameoneofthebiggestcitiesinCalifornia.C、Itwasonlyasmallvillage.D、It
随机试题
减少了焊缝工作截面和接头________主要原因是焊接中气孔的存在。
当呼吸幅度减小而呼吸频率加快时,受影响最大的是
患者女性,67岁,发现乳腺包块1个月余,伴乳头溢液,X线图像如下,最有可能的诊断是
同一原子中,下列壳层电子离原子核最近的是
讲述活动是以培养学前儿童独立构思和表述一定内容的语言能力为基本目的,给儿童提供积极参与命题性质的实践机会。从讲述对象的特点分,可分为()。
“君当作磐石,妾当作蒲苇,蒲苇韧如丝,磐石无转移。”这一句子出自()。
3,7,2,47,(),2252
乙自认为甲需要一栋别墅,于是伪称自己是甲的代理人,以甲的名义与不知情的丙开发商签订买卖合同约定:丙开发商将一栋别墅以500万元的价格卖与甲。关于买卖合同,下列说法正确的有()。
请在【答题】菜单下选择【进入考生文件夹】命令,并按照题目要求完成下面的操作。注意:以下的文件必须都保存在考生文件夹下。中国的人口发展形势非常严峻,为此国家统计局每10年进行一次全国人口普查,以掌握全国人口的增长速度及规模。按照下列要求完
Yahoo!UserResearchYahoo!NeedsYou!HelpusshapethefutureofYahoo!byjoiningo
最新回复
(
0
)