Movie tests Asimov’s moral code for robots

July 19, 2004 | Source: NewScientist.com News

Even if researchers are ever able to build robots with enough intelligence to comprehend Asimov’s laws, they are unlikely to be implemented.

Although they attracted some interest in the early stages of AI research, the rules were quickly abandoned as too prescriptive and simplistic.

“They stem from an innocent bygone age, when people seriously thought that intelligence was something that could be ‘programmed in’ as a series of logical propositions,” said Steve Grand, who founded the UK company Cyberlife Research and is working on developing artificial intelligence through learning.

The key problem, Grand says, is that the basic operating principles of the human brain — the only model for advanced intelligence that we have — are not well understood.