The important question is who's to blame when they don't.
Right now there's civil liability for the end customer, integrator, and manufacturer (depending on who failed to follow ANSI/ISO robotic safety guidelines) in industrial automation accidents, and criminal liability if the failure rises to the level of negligence. It honestly works pretty well, every site I've ever worked at has been happy to put safety first and throughput second, to a degree that my ordinarily cynical outlook is pleasantly surprised.
But I don't trust the justice system to correctly follow logical reasoning when these things are used for violence. Who's at fault when a desperate soldier straps something to one of these things and sends it off to commit war crimes - the soldier? The brass who put the soldier in that position with those tools and got that entirely expected result? Boston Dynamics engineers and others who built the tools and shipped them with fine print that says "by clicking OK you agree not to violate the Geneva convention with this"? The robot itself, sentenced to run with worn out bearings and low hydraulic fluid in a long prison sentence?
It brings to mind the Nathaniel Borenstein quote [1]:
> It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
Right now there's civil liability for the end customer, integrator, and manufacturer (depending on who failed to follow ANSI/ISO robotic safety guidelines) in industrial automation accidents, and criminal liability if the failure rises to the level of negligence. It honestly works pretty well, every site I've ever worked at has been happy to put safety first and throughput second, to a degree that my ordinarily cynical outlook is pleasantly surprised.
But I don't trust the justice system to correctly follow logical reasoning when these things are used for violence. Who's at fault when a desperate soldier straps something to one of these things and sends it off to commit war crimes - the soldier? The brass who put the soldier in that position with those tools and got that entirely expected result? Boston Dynamics engineers and others who built the tools and shipped them with fine print that says "by clicking OK you agree not to violate the Geneva convention with this"? The robot itself, sentenced to run with worn out bearings and low hydraulic fluid in a long prison sentence?
It brings to mind the Nathaniel Borenstein quote [1]:
> It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
[1] http://www.guppylake.com/~nsb/CSCW-ATOMICMAIL.txt