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Introducing “HardWIRED: Welcome to the Robotic Future,” a new video series in which we explore the many fascinating machines that are transforming society.

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Are humans the weak link?

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Inside an Amazon warehouse on Cyber Monday

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Every holiday season, Amazon ships millions of packages to customers all over the world. But how are they able to ship everything so quickly while keeping prices down? We got a look inside one of Amazon's California fulfillment centers to see how it all works.

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Product Recall advert from Channel 4 show Humans.

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Persona Synthetics - Attention! Product Recall

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The Rise of the Machines - Why Automation is Different this Time

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Automation in the Information Age is different.

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iRobot Film: Themes of Morality and Ethics

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iRobot Film: Themes of Morality and Ethics

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Are rules enough? Fits well with MIT Moral Machine, and Trolley Problem.

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Struggling with themes such as Morality and Ethics in Isaac Asimovâ€™s I, Robot? Weâ€™ve got the quick and easy lowdown on it here.

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BBC Magazine

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We are not used to the idea of machines making ethical decisions, but the day when they will routinely do this - by themselves - is fast approaching. So how, asks the BBC's David Edmonds, will we teach them to do the right thing?

The car arrives at your home bang on schedule at 8am to take you to work. You climb into the back seat and remove your electronic reading device from your briefcase to scan the news. There has never been trouble on the journey before: there's usually little congestion. But today something unusual and terrible occurs: two children, wrestling playfully on a grassy bank, roll on to the road in front of you. There's no time to brake. But if the car skidded to the left it would hit an oncoming motorbike.

Neither outcome is good, but which is least bad?

The year is 2027, and there's something else you should know. The car has no driver.

I'm in the passenger seat and Dr Amy Rimmer is sitting behind the steering wheel.

Amy pushes a button on a screen, and, without her touching any more controls, the car drives us smoothly down a road, stopping at a traffic light, before signalling, turning a sharp left, navigating a roundabout and pulling gently into a lay-by.

The journey's nerve-jangling for about five minutes. After that, it already seems humdrum. Amy, a 29-year-old with a Cambridge University PhD, is the lead engineer on the Jaguar Land Rover autonomous car. She is responsible for what the car sensors see, and how the car then responds.

She says that this car, or something similar, will be on our roads in a decade.

Many technical issues still need to be overcome. But one obstacle for the driverless car - which may delay its appearance - is not merely mechanical, or electronic, but moral.

The dilemma prompted by the children who roll in front of the car is a variation on the famous (or notorious) "trolley problem" in philosophy. A train (or tram, or trolley) is hurtling down a track. It's out of control. The brakes have failed. But disaster lies ahead - five people are tied to the track. If you do nothing, they'll all be killed. But you can flick the points and redirect the train down a side-track - so saving the five. The bad news is that there's one man on that side-track and diverting the train will kill him. What should you do?

This question has been put to millions of people around the world. Most believe you should divert the train.

But now take another variation of the problem. A runaway train is hurtling towards five people. This time you are standing on a footbridge overlooking the track, next to a man with a very bulky rucksack. The only way to save the five is to push Rucksack Man to his death: the rucksack will block the path of the train. Once again it's a choice between one life and five, but most people believe that Rucksack Man should not be killed.

This puzzle has been around for decades, and still divides philosophers. Utilitarians, who believe that we should act so as to maximise happiness, or well-being, think our intuitions are wrong about Rucksack Man. Rucksack Man should be sacrificed: we should save the five lives.

Trolley-type dilemmas are wildly unrealistic. Nonetheless, in the future there may be a few occasions when the driverless car does have to make a choice - which way to swerve, who to harm, or who to risk harming? These questions raise many more. What kind of ethics should we programme into the car? How should we value the life of the driver compared to bystanders or passengers in other cars? Would you buy a car that was prepared to sacrifice its driver to spare the lives of pedestrians? If so, you're unusual.

Then there's the thorny matter of who's going to make these ethical decisions. Will the government decide how cars make choices? Or the manufacturer? Or will it be you, the consumer? Will you be able to walk into a showroom and select the car's ethics as you would its colour? "I'd like to purchase a Porsche utilitarian 'kill-one-to-save-five' convertible in blue please..."

Find out more

Listen to Can We Teach Robots Ethics? on Analysis, on BBC Radio 4, at 20:30 on Monday 16 October - or catch up later on the BBC iPlayer

Listen to The Inquiry on the BBC World Service - click here for transmission times or to listen online

Ron Arkin became interested in such questions when he attended a conference on robot ethics in 2004. He listened as one delegate was discussing the best bullet to kill people - fat and slow, or small and fast? Arkin felt he had to make a choice "whether or not to step up and take responsibility for the technology that we're creating". Since then, he's devoted his career to working on the ethics of autonomous weapons.

There have been calls for a ban on autonomous weapons, but Arkin takes the opposite view: if we can create weapons which make it less likely that civilians will be killed, we must do so. "I don't support war. But if we are foolish enough to continue killing ourselves - over God knows what - I believe the innocent in the battle space need to be better protected," he says.

Like driverless cars, autonomous weapons are not science fiction. There are already weapons that operate without being fully controlled by humans. Missiles exist which can change course if they are confronted by an enemy counter-attack, for example. Arkin's approach is sometimes called "top-down". That is, he thinks we can programme robots with something akin to the Geneva Convention war rules - prohibiting, for example, the deliberate killing of civilians. Even this is a horrendously complex challenge: the robot will have to distinguish between the enemy combatant wielding a knife to kill, and the surgeon holding a knife he's using to save the injured.

An alternative way to approach these problems involves what is known as "machine learning".

Susan Anderson is a philosopher, Michael Anderson a computer scientist. As well as being married, they're professional collaborators. The best way to teach a robot ethics, they believe, is to first programme in certain principles ("avoid suffering", "promote happiness"), and then have the machine learn from particular scenarios how to apply the principles to new situations.

Take carebots - robots designed to assist the sick and elderly, by bringing food or a book, or by turning on the lights or the TV. The carebot industry is expected to burgeon in the next decade. Like autonomous weapons and driverless cars, carebots will have choices to make. Suppose a carebot is faced with a patient who refuses to take his or her medication. That might be all right for a few hours, and the patient's autonomy is a value we would want to respect. But there will come a time when help needs to be sought, because the patient's life may be in danger.

After processing a series of dilemmas by applying its initial principles, the Andersons believe that the robot would become clearer about how it should act. Humans could even learn from it. "I feel it would make more ethically correct decisions than a typical human," says Susan. Neither Anderson is fazed by the prospect of being cared for by a carebot. "Much rather a robot than the embarrassment of being changed by a human," says Michael.

However machine learning throws up problems of its own. One is that the machine may learn the wrong lessons. To give a related example, machines that learn language from mimicking humans have been shown to import various biases. Male and female names have different associations. The machine may come to believe that a John or Fred is more suitable to be a scientist than a Joanna or Fiona. We would need to be alert to these biases, and to try to combat them.

A yet more fundamental challenge is that if the machine evolves through a learning process we may be unable to predict how it will behave in the future; we may not even understand how it reaches its decisions. This is an unsettling possibility, especially if robots are making crucial choices about our lives. A partial solution might be to insist that if things do go wrong, we have a way to audit the code - a way of scrutinising what's happened. Since it would be both silly and unsatisfactory to hold the robot responsible for an action (what's the point of punishing a robot?), a further judgement would have to be made about who was morally and legally culpable for a robot's bad actions.

One big advantage of robots is that they will behave consistently. They will operate in the same way in similar situations. The autonomous weapon won't make bad choices because it is angry. The autonomous car won't get drunk, or tired, it won't shout at the kids on the back seat. Around the world, more than a million people are killed in car accidents each year - most by human error. Reducing those numbers is a big prize.

Quite how much we should value consistency is an interesting issue, though. If robot judges provide consistent sentences for convicted criminals, this seems to be a powerful reason to delegate the sentencing role. But would nothing be lost in removing the human contact between judge and accused? Prof John Tasioulas at King's College London believes there is value in messy human relations. "Do we really want a system of sentencing that mechanically churns out a uniform answer in response to the agonising conflict of values often involved? Something of real significance is lost when we eliminate the personal integrity and responsibility of a human decision-maker," he argues.

Amy Rimmer is excited about the prospect of the driverless car. It's not just the lives saved. The car will reduce congestion and emissions and will be "one of the few things you will be able to buy that will give you time". What would it do in our trolley conundrum? Crash into two kids, or veer in front of an oncoming motorbike? Jaguar Land Rover hasn't yet considered such questions but Amy is not convinced that matters: "I don't have to answer that question to pass a driving test, and I'm allowed to drive. So why would we dictate that the car has to have an answer to these unlikely scenarios before we're allow to get the benefits from it?"

That's an excellent question. If driverless cars save life overall why not allow them on to the road before we resolve what they should do in very rare circumstances? Ultimately, though, we'd better hope that our machines can be ethically programmed - because, like it or not, in the future more and more decisions that are currently taken by humans will be delegated to robots.

There are certainly reasons to worry. We may not fully understand why a robot has made a particular decision. And we need to ensure that the robot does not absorb and compound our prejudices. But there's also a potential upside. The robot may turn out to be better at some ethical decisions than we are. It may even make us better people.
Illustrations are From Would You Kill The Fat Man? By David Edmonds. Princeton University Press, 2014

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We are not used to the idea of machines making ethical decisions, but the day when they will routinely do this - by themselves - is fast approaching. So how, asks the BBC's David Edmonds, will we teach them to do the right thing?

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Test your bias on the MIT self driving car simulator. What should the machine choose?

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A platform for public participation in and discussion of the human perspective on machine-made moral decisions

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Imagine you are standing beside some tram tracks. In the distance, you spot a runaway trolley hurtling down the tracks towards five workers who cannot hear it coming. Even if they do spot it, they won't be able to move out of the way in time.

As this disaster looms, you glance down and see a lever connected to the tracks. You realise that if you pull the lever, the tram will be diverted down a second set of tracks away from the five unsuspecting workers.

However, down this side track is one lone worker, just as oblivious as his colleagues.

So, would you pull the lever, leading to one death but saving five?

This is the crux of the classic thought experiment known as the trolley dilemma, developed by philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967 and adapted by Judith Jarvis Thomson in 1985.

The trolley dilemma allows us to think through the consequences of an action and consider whether its moral value is determined solely by its outcome.

The trolley dilemma has since proven itself to be a remarkably flexible tool for probing our moral intuitions, and has been adapted to apply to various other scenarios, such as war, torture, drones, abortion and euthanasia.
Variations
Now consider now the second variation of this dilemma.

Imagine you are standing on a footbridge above the tram tracks. You can see the runaway trolley hurtling towards the five unsuspecting workers, but there's no lever to divert it.

However, there is large man standing next to you on the footbridge. You're confident that his bulk would stop the tram in its tracks.

So, would you push the man on to the tracks, sacrificing him in order to stop the tram and thereby saving five others?

The outcome of this scenario is identical to the one with the lever diverting the trolley onto another track: one person dies; five people live. The interesting thing is that, while most people would throw the lever, very few would approve of pushing the fat man off the footbridge.

Thompson and other philosophers have given us other variations on the trolley dilemma that are also scarily entertaining. Some don't even include trolleys.

Imagine you are a doctor and you have five patients who all need transplants in order to live. Two each require one lung, another two each require a kidney and the fifth needs a heart.

In the next ward is another individual recovering from a broken leg. But other than their knitting bones, they're perfectly healthy. So, would you kill the healthy patient and harvest their organs to save five others?

Again, the consequences are the same as the first dilemma, but most people would utterly reject the notion of killing the healthy patient.
Inconsistent or are there other factors than consequences at play? Actions, Intentions And Consequences
If all the dilemmas above have the same consequence, yet most people would only be willing to throw the lever, but not push the fat man or kill the healthy patient, does that mean our moral intuitions are not always reliable, logical or consistent?

Perhaps there's another factor beyond the consequences that influences our moral intuitions?

Foot argued that there's a distinction between killing and letting die. The former is active while the latter is passive.

In the first trolley dilemma, the person who pulls the lever is saving the life of the five workers and letting the one person die. After all, pulling the lever does not inflict direct harm on the person on the side track.

But in the footbridge scenario, pushing the fat man over the side is in intentional act of killing.

This is sometimes described as the principle of double effect, which states that it's permissible to indirectly cause harm (as a side or "double" effect) if the action promotes an even greater good. However, it's not permissible to directly cause harm, even in the pursuit of a greater good.

Thompson offered a different perspective. She argued that moral theories that judge the permissibility of an action based on its consequences alone, such as consequentialism or utilitarianism, cannot explain why some actions that cause killings are permissible while others are not.

If we consider that everyone has equal rights, then we would be doing something wrong in sacrificing one even if our intention was to save five.

Research done by neuroscientists has investigated which parts of the brain were activated when people considered the first two variations of the trolley dilemma.

They noted that the first version activates our logical, rational mind and thus if we decided to pull the lever it was because we intended to save a larger number of lives.

However, when we consider pushing the bystander, our emotional reasoning becomes involved and we therefore feel differently about killing one in order to save five.

Are our emotions in this instance leading us to the correct action? Should we avoid sacrificing one, even if it is to save five?
Real World Dilemmas
The trolley dilemma and its variations demonstrate that most people approve of some actions that cause harm, yet other actions with the same outcome are not considered permissible.

Not everyone answers the dilemmas in the same way, and even when people agree, they may vary in their justification of the action they defend.

These thought experiments have been used to stimulate discussion about the difference between killing versus letting die, and have even appeared, in one form or another, in popular culture, such as the film Eye In The Sky.
In Eye in the Sky, military and political leaders have to decide whether it's permissible to harm or kill one innocent person in order to potentially save many lives. Bleecker Street Media
Laura D'Olimpio, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Notre Dame Australia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The Trolley Dilemma: Would You Kill One Person To Save Five?

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Imagine you are standing beside some tram tracks. In the distance, you spot a runaway trolley hurtling down the tracks towards five workers who cannot hear it coming. Even if they do spot it, they won't be able to move out of the way in time.

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london school of economics and political science

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London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

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#LSENewsroom | Andrew Murray | Should we give robots legal rights?

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As robots become smarter and more complex, is it time to start thinking about giving them legal rights? Humans have created them and so are responsible for their wellbeing, claims Professor Andrew Murray. Listen to Andrew Murray's lecture on Machine Intelligence and the Law: http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/publicEvents/pdf/2015-MT/20150930-Andrew-Murry-PPT-AMENDED.pdf

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"Then I'm a murderer. Right?" Check out more awesome BuzzFeedBlue videos! http://bit.ly/YTbuzzfeedblue1 MUSIC The Seq Licensed via Warner Chappell Production Music Inc. SFX provided by Audioblocks. (https://www.Audioblocks.com) BUZZFEED.COM VIDEO POST OF PUBLISHED VIDEO ex: www.buzzfeed.com/nedfulmer/8-problems-only-cats-understand GET MORE BUZZFEED: www.buzzfeed.com www.buzzfeed.com/video www.buzzfeed.com/videoteam www.youtube.com/buzzfeedvideo www.youtube.com/buzzfeedyellow www.youtube.com/buzzfeedblue www.youtube.com/buzzfeedviolet www.youtube.com/buzzfeed BUZZFEED BLUE Tasty short, fun, inspiring, funny, interesting videos from BuzzFeed.

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The 3 Robotics laws are a set of laws conceived by the celebrated science fiction author Isaac Asimov.

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From Boston Robotics

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Handle is a research robot that stands 6.5 ft tall, travels at 9 mph and jumps 4​ ​feet vertically. ​It uses electric power to operate both electric and hydraulic actuators, with a range of about 15 miles on one battery charge.

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From Boston Robotics