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Ethical Issues and Concerns–Are they going to continue to be with us or will they turn against us?

  • Yoseph Bar-Cohen
  • David Hanson
  • Adi Marom
Chapter
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Abstract

As we get closer and closer to producing truly humanlike machines, ethical questions and concerns are increasingly becoming more pointed. In contrast to other machines that are simply improving the way we live, this technology will also complicate our life or, if we are not sufficiently careful, may even hurt us in ways that few other technologies could ever do. Even though the realization of truly smart and capable robots currently seems to be years away, it is important to deal with the issues they raise at the early stages as we put the foundations of this technology in place. Figure 7.1 illustrates the vision of such robots in our human society filling positive or negative roles, or possibly both. In order to take the greatest advantage of their emerging capabilities it is important to direct their development into positive channels and protect ourselves from the negative possibilities.

Keywords

Science Fiction Violent Game Slave Robot Nonliving Thing Autonomous Machine 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009

Authors and Affiliations

  • Yoseph Bar-Cohen
    • 1
  • David Hanson
    • 2
  • Adi Marom
    • 3
  1. 1.California Institute of Technology, Jet Propulsion LabPasadena
  2. 2.Hanson RoboticsRichardson
  3. 3.New York

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