It is Possible to Safely Coexist with Robots?

It is Possible to Safely Coexist with Robots?
A study published in the International Journal of Social Robotics, authors mentioned a story that took place back in 1981, when a 37-year-olf factory employee decided to carry out some maintenance on a robot that was kept in a restricted safety room. The worker wanted to do the job so fast that he forgot to turn the machine off and as a result the powerful hydraulic arm of the robot pushed him into the neighboring machinery. The engineer was registered as the first victim of a robot.

There's no doubt that most people would consider that it was not the robot's fault. However, with a continuous shift of the machines from the industrial zones into the real world, their presence in the life of humans could turn into a widely discussed question and thus become a serious social and technological issue.

Machines Among Us
Engineers in South Korea and Japan are already talking about the use of robots in every day life. They are considering integrating robots into human life, allowing them to co-exist with us. The two countries believe that human-robot coexistence society will emerge by 2030. According to South Korean engineers every home in the country will have at least one robot by 2020. Apart from industrial robots that are mounted inside factories doing repetitive tasks, the robots of the new generation that will be among humans will be relatively autonomous. This means that they will be able to help humans do a variety of tasks such as nursing homes and offices. However, before these robots (which are considered neither alive nor dead) became a trend in human society, regulators are thinking about the ways of addressing the safety and legal issues which might occur.

According to Phyorg.com, in their research, Yueh-Hsuan Weng, who previously worked at Conscription Agency of Taiwan, Ministry of the Interior, Chien-Hsun Chen and Chuen-Tsai Sun from the National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, have offered an idea for a legal system that centers the Next Generation Robot safety issues. The researchers aim to make a safer robot design. This will be possible with the help of "safety intelligence". In addition, they propose a method for solving problems linked with sudden accidents. Besides, the authors of the study decided to analyze the Three Laws of Robotics mentioned for the first time by famous writer Isaac Asimov. However, like the majority of experts today, authors have doubts that these laws could create an adequate foundation for guaranteeing that robots make their work without any harm for the human kind.

A guiding code of the offered framework involves the classification of robots as "third existence" bodies. This is because the robots of the next generation will be considered neither living/biological, which is the first existence, nor non-living/non-biological, which is second existence. The definition of the third existence says that the machines will look and behave like living creatures, but will not be self-aware. Currently robots are categorized as second existence, belonging to humans, and while this remains so, the authors of the research consider that a categorization of the third existence would just deal with accidents in terms of liability distribution.

Challenges
Engineers will have to face an important challenge when deciding to integrate robots into our society. One of such challenges is getting the "third existence" recognize the nuances of human language. It is worth mentioning that each word in natural language stands next to a key definition and the open texture character makes it possible to carry out interpretations that may differ depending on the outside factors. Thus, the authors of the study suggested a "legal machine language", which is part of the engineer's safety intelligence concept. Within the legal machine language, robots will include ethics that would be embedded into them through a code developed to deal with problems linked with open texture risk. This is something that Asimov's Three Laws are unable to specifically address.
Researchers also mentioned that the Three Laws of Robotics, invented by Asimov, were initially created for literary purposes, but all these laws are ambiguous, which makes the liabilities of the robots' makers, owners and governments somewhat uncertain. Chen said: "The legal machine language framework stands on legal and engineering perspectives of safety issues, which we face in the near future, by combining two basic ideas: 'Code is Law' and 'Embedded Ethics'". The researcher added that within this framework, the autonomous intelligence of machines is not the only aspect of the safety issues. The study authors decided to divide the safety issues into several levels with their own peculiarities and approaches. One of such levels is the way machines operate with humans. Another one is legal framework that would monitor the usage of robots and control the code of the machines. In such a way it would be possible to deal with the safety issues of machines in the future, when they become important tools in our everyday lives.

One of the authors mentioned that making it impossible for robots to understand human language, the legal robot language might help keep machines apart from humans. In case robots do understand human language someday we could end up with robot judge instead of human judge or robot lawyer instead of human lawyer dealing with the lawsuits that would take place between human and robots. If it would be possible for robots to learn kindness from humans it would also be possible for them to learn hypocrisy and greed. Taking these into consideration we can imagine that there is still a lot of work to do in the field. It would be better and easier to keep the machines at a distance, especially from the human legal system. Besides limiting robots in language, researchers also consider limiting them in abilities.

Earlier Attempts
The research also mentioned about previous efforts to prepare for a world in which humans will live together with robots. Some of the organizations that worked on such projects include the European Robotics Research Network (EURON), a privately-owned organization that focuses on analyzing robot ethics; the Robot Ethics Charter established by the government of South Korea and which is believed to be the first in the world set of ethical guidelines for machines. One of the rules includes protecting robots from human abuse. Japan was not left behind - its government started examining safety issues using the Robot Policy Committee. In order to test the interactions of machines within realistic surroundings, Japan decided to set up in 2003 the Robot Development Empiricism Area, which may shortly be described as robot city.

Although scientists carried out several studies on the subject of robot safety, there are still a lot of technical and social challenges that regulators have to face. One of the issues refers to the case mentioned at the beginning of the article, when a person dies as a result of machine's activity (the designer, developed, user or the robot should take the responsibility?). When more robots will be living together with humans, it would greatly increase the need to create a legal framework. During the human-robot coexistence the biggest challenges would be to preserve a balance in the interactions between humans and machines and create a legal regulation framework.