Here is a quote from the Chalmers paper that I linked yesterday:

One might think that the singularity would be of great interest to academic philosophers, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers. In practice, this has not been the case. Good was an eminent academic, but his article was largely unappreciated at the time. The subsequent discussion of the singularity has largely taken place in nonacademic circles, including Internet forums, popular media and books, and workshops organized by the independent Singularity Institute. Perhaps the highly speculative flavor of the singularity idea has been responsible for academic resistance to the idea.

I think this resistance is a shame, as the singularity idea is clearly an important one. The argument for a singularity is one that we should take seriously. And the questions surrounding the singularity are of enormous practical and philosophical concern.

Practically: If there is a singularity, it will be one of the most important events in the history of the planet. An intelligence explosion has enormous potential benefits: a cure for all known diseases, an end to poverty, extraordinary scientific advances, and much more. It also has enormous potential dangers: an end to the human race, an arms race of warring machines, the power to destroy the planet. So if there is even a small chance that there will be a singularity, we would do well to think about what forms it might take and whether there is anything we can do to influence the outcomes in a positive direction.

Great advice for everyone living in the 21st century!

Recently, David Chalmers announced that he was posting a new paper based on his Singularity Summit 2010 talk: “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”. In his announcement, Chalmers notes, “I’m still an amateur on these topics and any feedback would be appreciated.” You can also watch a video of Chalmers’ Summit talk.

Here’s a paper presented at the 2009 Asia-Pacific Conference on Computing and Philosophy by participants in SIAI’s 2009 Visiting Fellows Program that is making the rounds. The point of the paper, which was written by Carl Shulman, Nick Tarleton, and Henrik Jonsson, is that consequentialism as commonly discussed has a number of “free variables” where intuitions disagree about the right values of these variables. Therefore, machine ethics should draw on the emerging field of moral psychology to figure out how to fill in these free variables. This point is plainly put in the title of one of the last sections, “Current moral theories are inadequate for machine ethics”.

A reply from UK philosopher David Pearce has recently been posted by Roko Mijic at Less Wrong.

Check out my blog post, “Hungry Optimizers with Low-Complexity Values” at Accelerating Future.

Ed Boyden, who leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT, is concerned about the Singularity, and will be speaking at our upcoming Singularity Summit conference in New York. He recently published the article “The Singularity and the Fixed Point” on the website of Technology Review, MIT’s magazine, which looks into the challenge of giving Artificial Intelligence proper motivations. Making theoretical progress on the question of, “how do we give Artificial Intelligence proper motivations, such that we can trust those motivations even if the AI becomes smarter and more powerful than humans?” is a primary reason for SIAI’s existence.

This article comes from www.independent.co.uk, discuss about Artificial Intelligence in Robot War

The robots are not so much coming; they have arrived. But instead of dominating humanity with superior logic and strength, they threaten to create an underclass of people who are left without human contact.

The rise of robots in the home, in the workplace and in warfare needs to be supervised and controlled by ethical guidelines which limit how they can be used in sensitive scenarios such as baby-sitting, caring for the elderly, and combat, a leading scientist warns today.

Sales of professional and personal service robots worldwide were estimated to have reached about 5.5 million this year ? and are expected to more than double to 11.5 million by 2011 ? yet there is little or no control over how these machines are used. Some help busy professionals entertain children; other machines feed and bathe the elderly and incapacitated.

Professor Noel Sharkey, an expert on artificial intelligence based at the University of Sheffield, warns that robots are being introduced to potentially sensitive situations that could lead to isolation and lack of human contact, because of the tendency to leave robots alone with their charges for long periods.

“We need to look at guidelines for a cut-off so we have a limit to the contact with robots,” Professor Sharkey said. “Some robots designed to look after children now are so safe that parents can leave their children with them for hours, or even days.”

More than a dozen companies based in Japan and South Korea manufacture robot “companions” and carers for children. For example, NEC has tested its cute-looking personal robot PaPeRo on children: the device lives at home with a family, recognises their faces, can mimic their behaviour and be programmed to tell jokes, all the while exploring the house. Many robots are designed as toys, but they can also take on childcare roles by monitoring the movements of a child and communicating with a parent in another room, or even another building, through wireless computer connection or mobile phone.

“Research into service robots has demonstrated a close bonding and attachment by children, who, in most cases, prefer a robot to a teddy bear,” Professor Sharkey said. “Short-term exposure can provide an enjoyable and entertaining experience that creates interest and curiosity. But because of the physical safety that robot minders provide, children could be left without human contact for many hours a day or perhaps several days, and the possible psychological impact of the varying degrees of social isolation on development is unknown.” Less playful robots are being developed to look after elderly people. Secom makes a computer called My Spoon which helps disabled people to eat food from a table. Sanyo has built an electric bathtub robot that automatically washes and rinses someone suffering from movement disability.

“At the other end of the age spectrum [to child care], the relative increase in many countries in the population of the elderly relative to available younger care-givers has spurred the development of elder-care robots,” Professor Sharkey said.

“These robots can help the elderly to maintain independence in their own homes, but their presence could lead to the risk of leaving the elderly in the exclusive care of machines without sufficient human contact. The elderly need the human contact that is often provided only by caregivers and people performing day-to-day tasks for them.”

In the journal Science, Professor Sharkey calls for ethical guidelines to cover all aspects of robotic technology, not just in the home and workplace, but also on the battlefield, where lethal robots such as the missile-armed Predator drones used in Iraq and Afghanistan are already deployed with lethal effect. The US Future Combat Systems project aims to use robots as “force multipliers”, with a single soldier initiating large-scale ground and aerial attacks by a robot droid army. “Robots for care and for war represent just two of many ethically problematic areas that will soon arise from the rapid increase and spreading diversity of robotics applications,” Professor Sharkey said. “Scientists and engineers working in robotics must be mindful of the potential dangers of their work, and public and international discussion is vital in order to set policy guidelines for ethical and safe application before the guidelines set themselves.”

The call for controls over robots goes back to the 1940s when the science-fiction author Isaac Asimov drew up his famous three laws of robotics. The first rule stated that robots must not harm people; the second that they must obey the commands of people provided they does not conflict with the first law; and the third law was that robots must attempt to avoid harming themselves provided this was not in conflict with the two other laws.

Asimov wrote a collection of science fiction stories called I, Robot which exploited the issue of machines and morality. He wanted to counter the long history of fictional accounts of dangerous automatons ? from the Jewish Golem to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ? and used his three laws as a literary device to exploit the ethical issues arising from the human interaction with non-human, intelligent beings. But late 20th-century predictions about the rise of machines endowed with superior artificial intelligence have not been realised, although robot scientists have given their mechanical protégés quasi-intelligent traits such as simple speech recognition, emotional expression and face recognition.

Professor Starkey believes that even dumb robots need to be controlled. “I’m not suggesting like Asimov to put ethical rules into robots, but to just to have guidelines on how robots are used,” he said. “Current robots are not bright enough even to be called stupid. If I even thought they would be superior in intelligence, I would not have these concerns. They are dumb machines not much brighter than the average washing machine, and that’s the problem.”

Isaac Asimov: The three laws of robotics

The science fiction author Isaac Asimov, who died in 1992, coined the phrase “robotics” to describe the study of robots. In 1940, Asimov drew up his three laws of robotics, partly as a literary device to exploit the ethical issues arising from the interaction with intelligent machines.

* First Law: a robot must not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to be harmed.

* Second Law: a robot must obey the commands of human beings, except where the orders conflict with the first law.

* Third Law: a robot must protect its own existence so long as this does not conflict with the first two laws.

Later on, Asimov amended the laws by adding two more. The “zeroth” law stated that a robot must not harm humanity, which deals with the ethical problem arising from following the first law but in the process putting other human beings at risk.

Asimov also added a final “law of procreation” stating that robots must not make other robots that do not follow the laws of robotics.

This article come from www.starnewsonline.com

The Da Vinci S Surgical team (from left) Miriam Whitaker, C.S. Technician, Carol Dupalevich, RN, and Amy McCracken, RN, set up the Da Vinci S Surgical Robot arms which are controlled by a surgeon from a remote console with 3D HD Vision. The robotic platform is designed to enable complex surgery using a minimally invasive approach.

Inside one of New Hanover Regional Medical Center?s surgical rooms, wirelessly controlled, robotic arms hovered over patients like something out of a science fiction movie.

Doctors moved the arms while sitting several feet away from the operating table, pinching and swiveling surgical joysticks.

?I believe this is the future of surgery,? said Christian deBeck, a urologist at New Hanover Regional. He was the first surgeon to start using robotic surgery at the hospital, where 15 procedures have been conducted since September.

With the purchase of a da Vinci S surgical system, now dubbed Leo, New Hanover Regional joined a growing number of hospitals nationwide adopting the technology. More than 20 hospitals in North Carolina are using da Vinci systems, though New Hanover Regional is the only one in this area, according to Intuitive Surgical, the only company making the machines commercially.

The benefit, said doctors showing off the unit Wednesday, is that Leo allows for minimally invasive surgeries. Smaller cuts means less pulling and tissue damage than open surgery, and patients lose less blood and recover more quickly.

Some of those claims were backed in a study last month from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, which monitored patients who underwent robotic surgery for two gynecological cancer procedures.

While an open-surgery hysterectomy could require a 6-inch cut, the robotic surgery only makes five, small incision points, said Walter Gajewski, a gynecologic oncologist at New Hanover Regional.

He said working on the machines feels natural because the miniscule clamps attached to the machine?s three arms swivel around, mimicking how the surgeon would be moving if their hands were above the patient and not working remote controls.

?It?s a greater range of motion than the human hand,? said Amy McCracken, a robotics charge nurse.

Peering at a video screen, surgeons zoom in and out from a fourth arm floating over the operating table. The 3-D video appears in high definition, and surgeons can magnify the image up to 10 times.

The result is increased precision, particularly with dissecting lymph nodes in cancer operations.

Because of the system?s expense, both with upfront investment and ongoing supplies costs, the robotic unit is not a money maker for the hospital, deBeck said. He did not say how much the da Vinci cost to buy but put the price tag at more than $1 million.

?It?s patient driven,? he said about the service. ?It is a big commitment from the hospital.?

A Call of Papers has been issued for a track on “Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies,” at the 7th European conference on Computing And Philosophy?ECAP 2009, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2-4 July 2009.

Historical analysis of a broad range of paradigm shifts in science, biology, history, and technology–in particular in computing technology–suggests an accelerating rate of progress. This observation has led the attempted unification of the predictive power of biological evolution, cultural evolution, and technological evolution under a “Law of Accelerating Returns.” As a consequence, John von Neumann forecasted the arrival of an ?essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue.? This notion of Singularity coincides in time and nature with Alan Turing (1950) and Stephen Hawking’s (1998) expectation of machines that exhibit intelligence on par with an average human by 2050. John Irving Good (1965) and Vernor Vinge (1993) expect it to take the form of an ‘intelligence explosion’: the process by which ultraintelligent machines design ever more intelligent machines. Transhumanists suggest a parallel process of explosive progress in human intelligence. Unfortunately, the very term ?Singularity? also suggests the presence of an ?event horizon,? an epistemological barrier on our ability to understand the events that may follow it.

We invite abstracts examining the following issues from a philosophical, computational, mathematical, and scientific points of view:

1. Empirical assessments of the Law of Accelerating Returns
2. Estimating the reliability of a technological forecasts
3. Historical analysis of the Law of Accelerating Returns
4. The impact of acceleration on science and society by 2050
5. Hazards of technological acceleration and preventative measures
6. The nature of the Technological Singularity
7. The nature of an intelligence explosion
8. Beyond the ?event horizon? of the Technological Singularity

Papers submitted to the Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies track in ECAP 2009 will also be considered for publication in a special issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change (Elsevier).

Received from the track chair, Amnon H. Eden, School of Computer Science & Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK and Center For Inquiry, Amherst NY.