Past Visions of Artificial Futures: One Hundred and Fifty Years under the Spectre of Evolving Machines

The influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALife) technologies upon society, and their potential to fundamentally shape the future evolution of humankind, are topics very much at the forefront of current scientific, governmental and public debate. While these might seem like very modern concerns, they have a long history that is often disregarded in contemporary discourse. Insofar as current debates do acknowledge the history of these ideas, they rarely look back further than the origin of the modern digital computer age in the 1940s-50s. In this paper we explore the earlier history of these concepts. We focus in particular on the idea of self-reproducing and evolving machines, and potential implications for our own species. We show that discussion of these topics arose in the 1860s, within a decade of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species, and attracted increasing interest from scientists, novelists and the general public in the early 1900s. After introducing the relevant work from this period, we categorise the various visions presented by these authors of the future implications of evolving machines for humanity. We suggest that current debates on the co-evolution of society and technology can be enriched by a proper appreciation of the long history of the ideas involved.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2018 (ALIFE 2018), MIT Pres

On the verge of a new relationship between man and artificial learning machines?

We are now living an exciting time in which astonishing results coming from the A.I. field trigger the usualexpectations and fears about intelligent man-machinerelationship. Some believe that the basic ingredientsfor the artificial general intelligence are already hereand, in their opinion, it is just a matter of putting it alltogether. It seems that we do not have to programcomputers anymore; they will program themselves.Should this statement frighten us?Our position is both of recognizing the big potentialities of new A.I. developments and, simultaneously,to warn against yet another overselling and possiblydamaging stage in the A.I. field.We advocate that, intelligent systems, relying inevolving machine learning algorithms, fully autonomoussoftware agents or robots, should always follow the"human in the loop" principle, ensuring that theresponsibility for all future intelligent entity activitiescan be traced back to some recognized and accountableindividuals or organizations

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

Intelligent Agents in Military, Defense and Warfare: Ethical Issues and Concerns

Due to tremendous progress in digital electronics now intelligent and autonomous agents are gradually being adopted into the fields and domains of the military, defense and warfare. This paper tries to explore some of the inherent ethical issues, threats and some remedial issues about the impact of such systems on human civilization and existence in general. This paper discusses human ethics in contrast to machine ethics and the problems caused by non-sentient agents. A systematic study is made on paradoxes regarding the long-term advantages of such agents in military combat. This paper proposes an international standard which could be adopted by all nations to bypass the adverse effects and solve ethical issues of such intelligent agents

Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a digital technology that will be of major importance for the development of humanity in the near future. AI has raised fundamental questions about what we should do with such systems, what the systems themselves should do, what risks they involve and how we can control these. - After the background to the field (1), this article introduces the main debates (2), first on ethical issues that arise with AI systems as objects, i.e. tools made and used by humans; here, the main sections are privacy (2.1), manipulation (2.2), opacity (2.3), bias (2.4), autonomy & responsibility (2.6) and the singularity (2.7). Then we look at AI systems as subjects, i.e. when ethics is for the AI systems themselves in machine ethics (2.8.) and artificial moral agency (2.9). Finally we look at future developments and the concept of AI (3). For each section within these themes, we provide a general explanation of the ethical issues, we outline existing positions and arguments, then we analyse how this plays out with current technologies and finally what policy conse-quences may be drawn

"Involving Interface": An Extended Mind Theoretical Approach to Roboethics

In 2008 the authors held Involving Interface, a lively interdisciplinary event focusing on issues of biological, sociocultural, and technological interfacing (see Acknowledgments). Inspired by discussions at this event, in this article, we further discuss the value of input from neuroscience for developing robots and machine interfaces, and the value of philosophy, the humanities, and the arts for identifying persistent links between human interfacing and broader ethical concerns. The importance of ongoing interdisciplinary debate and public communication on scientific and technical advances is also highlighted. Throughout, the authors explore the implications of the extended mind hypothesis for notions of moral accountability and robotics