| Title:
| Handle With Care
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| Description:
| “The complexity of newly engineered systems coupled with their potential impact on lives, the environment, etc., raise a set of ethical issues that engineers had not been thinking about,” said William A. Wulf, a computer scientist who until last year headed the National Academy of Engineering. As one of his official last acts, he established the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society there. Rachelle Hollander, a philosopher who directs the center, said the new technologies were so powerful that “our saving grace, our inability to affect things at a planetary level, is being lost to us,” as human-induced climate change is demonstrating. ... “It’s a hot topic,” said Ronald C. Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech who advises the Army on robot weapons. “We need at least to think about what we are doing while we are doing it, to be aware of the consequences of our research.” ...Dr. Arkin said robotics researchers should consider not just how to make robots more capable, but also who must bear responsibility for their actions and how much human operators should remain “in the loop,” particularly with machines to aid soldiers on the battlefield or the disabled in their homes.
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| Author:
| Cornelia Dean
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| Orig. Date:
| August 11, 2008
|
| Source:
| NY TIMES (Science)
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| Subject:
|
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| Contributor:
| Bruce Buchanan
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| Comments:
|
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| Type:
| Text
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| Language:
| English
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| Format:
| html
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| Last Edit:
| Fri, 15 Aug 2008 07:58:08 -0700
|
Comment/Query/Broken link
