Futurists' report reviews dangers of smart robots - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

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Scientists are preparing to publish a report this month that examines, in part, whether robots could eventually become so smart they pose a threat to society.

The report will include concerns some researchers have voiced about the legal and ethical use of artificial intelligence.

Most computer scientists don't subscribe to radical visions of a robot-dominated future, said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher in Redmond, Wash., who called the group together to write the report.

But at least one scientist believes intelligent machines could pose threats to human beings. Another, Carnegie Mellon University's Tom Mitchell, said most alarming is what people might do with computers that are based on artificial intelligence.

Mitchell, the head of Carnegie Mellon's machine learning department in the School of Computer Science, agreed that no danger exists of robots taking over the world, particularly with current technology.

"But a realistic concern is the prospect of computer viruses becoming intelligent," he said.

An intelligent virus with speech-recognition abilities could hide in someone's laptop, desktop or cell phone and listen to conversations, Mitchell said.

"Government officials might want to listen to millions of people to find out who's talking about collecting bomb-making materials," he said. "Criminals might want to simply get your credit card information so they can use it. Planting that type of virus on cell phones would be the easiest way to do it."

David McAllester, a group member and computer scientist who is a professor and chief academic officer at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, believes it's inevitable that fully automated intelligent machines will be able to design and build smarter, better versions of themselves. He acknowledges he's in the minority among his peers.

He estimates a 10 percent chance of that happening within 25 years and a 90 percent chance of it occurring within 75 years.

Scientists describe that concept as "the intelligence explosion," or "the Singularity."

Once it happens, machines would become infinitely intelligent, ever-increasing in their capabilities, said McAllester, who earned his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"It's an incredibly dangerous scenario."

"If you're a young student in medicine, you have a code of ethics that tells you what's right and wrong. As a young roboticist, you don't have that code," said author P.W. Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at The Brookings Institute in Washington.

Addressing the ethical and legal questions is critical, said Singer, who wrote this year's book, "Wired for War." Robots represent a genuine revolution in human history, akin to the printing press, gunpowder and the atomic bomb, Singer said. The world is going to change in ways people can't predict -- as it did after those inventions, he said.

The U.S. military uses robots to kill people, so it's too late to enact a universal law as in Isaac Asimov's fiction that prohibits robots from harming people, Singer said.

Legal issues exist in how law enforcement uses robots, Singer said. The city of Houston uses drones for observation. That raises constitutional questions of privacy and probable cause, he said.

"Scientists engaging in the public debate is a very important thing," Singer said.

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