Does anyone here work in Robotics?

[ZeroSomeGameThingy]

Culd you say a little more about the Consequence Engine than the snippet I heard on R4 this morning?

[ZeroSomeGameThingy]

No one?

Not a single person on MN works in Robotics?

Or perhaps you just don't take phones into robot breeding spaces?

[claig]

I don't know if they work in robotics, but based on some of their posts, some of them are robotic.

[ZeroSomeGameThingy]

Ho hum...

Maybe I should re-train....

I could do a MN blog....

My DM would be proud - "My DD the robot scientist..."

How many MN members? How many?

And not one single robotics expert?

(Should I move this to Feminism and Women's Fatal Lack of Interest in the Future of the World?)

[BoomBoomsCousin]

I don't work in robotis Zero, but I work in computer science and my (v. limited) understanding of the idea of a consequence engine is in building artifical intelligence and creating ethical systems for those intelligiences. So a consequence engine would be programming that allowed an artificial intelligence to predit the consequences of its actions and those of the intelligences in its environment and allow it to make choices that maximize "good" outcomes. It would be improtant to stop an artificial intellignce obeying a rule it is supposed to follow that would have a consequence at odds with a set of values. A very simple example a robot with a rule to "obey it's owner" would still refuse an order to "cut someone's head off" as that would be odds with a value to maintain human life. Obviously that's a pretty simplified example, a more complex one would handle risk and conflicting values/outcomes.

[ZeroSomeGameThingy]

Oh!

Thank you. Yes, the Today article discussed (very briefly) Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

I suppose I'm quite anxious to know exactly where we're at... There must be an irresistible urge to progress as far as possible with an idea.

[BoomBoomsCousin]

Robotics is coming on very fast, it's fascinating but so fast paced I an only keep up with a very superficial overview of what's going on. If you ever do change careers (go on do it ) you could post a newsletter for us all.

I think a lot of what is currently being developd will be in the dark for quite a while as there's a lot of commercial value in the systems and also a lot of it is driven by the military, who are probably reluctant to have their system's values known and exploited. But there's probably also a fairly big open source community.

You could try posting in Science and nature club...

[BoomBoomsCousin]

Oh, it's just occured to me this consequence engine thing may have come to the BBc's attention because of the driverless car advances. I guess they'd need consequnce engines.

[ZeroSomeGameThingy]

If I had my time again I might well want to do something like this.

(In the real world however I'm one of those people who got into university on the strength of a Biology O' Level. So it probably won't happen.)

[dontkillbill]

Not in specifically robotics but I work in Computer Science specifically AI and internet connected objects. BoomBoomsCousin's (great name) explanation is stop on. Robotics is coming a long way and raising a lot of uncomfortable questions. There is a lot of money pouring into Silicon Valley tech companies in this area and google bought out a robotics company working in defence. We are graduating from roombas to possibly having robotic home help in our lifetime.

This is a good paper, link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-10401-0_8

[ZeroSomeGameThingy]

Was the robotics company anything at all to do with Raymond Kurzweil - the Singularity man? His beig employed by Google is - breathtaking.

Thank you so much for the link. That must be the conference that prompted the Today article. It's helpful to see the idea written down.

I chased up the book "Moral Machines" mentioned in the abstract. It's so beautiful that Amazon lists it alongside C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity and E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class.