Abstract
The greater ubiquity of robots creates a need for generic guidelines for robot behaviour. We focus less on how a robot can technically achieve a predefined goal, and more on what a robot should do in the first place. Particularly, we are interested in the question how a heuristic should look like which motivates the robot's behaviour in interaction with human agents. We make a concrete, operational proposal as to how the information-theoretic concept of empowerment can be used as a generic heuristic to quantify concepts such as self-preservation, protection of the human partner and responding to human actions. While elsewhere we studied involved single-agent scenarios in detail, here we present proof-of-principle scenarios demonstrating how empowerment interpreted in light of these perspectives allows one to specify core concepts with a similar aim as Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics in an operational way. Importantly, this route does not depend on having to establish an explicit verbalized understanding of human language and conventions in the robots. Also, it incorporates the ability to take into account a rich variety of different situations and types of robotic embodiment.
Highlights
One of the trends of modern robotics is to extend the role of robots beyond being a designed machine with a clearly defined functionality that operates according to a confined specification or safely separated from humans
Breaking action equivalence: how should a robot choose between several different actions when all Empowerment and the Three Laws produce essentially the same desired outcome, only in different ways? Can we formulate good secondary criteria that the robot should optimize in addition, once it can ensure that the primary job gets done? safety around robots: the default approach often involves a “kill switch,” i.e., the drastic and crude step of shutting down the robot and stopping all its actuators
The core aim of this article was to suggest three empowerment perspectives and to propose that these allow—in principle—for a formalization and operationalization of ideas roughly corresponding to the Three Laws of Robotics: the self-preservation of a robot, the protection of the robot’s human partner, and the robot supporting/expanding the human’s operational capabilities
Summary
One of the trends of modern robotics is to extend the role of robots beyond being a designed machine with a clearly defined functionality that operates according to a confined specification or safely separated from humans. While there is ample room to discuss the technicalities and implications of the Three Laws (McCauley, 2007; Anderson, 2008; Murphy and Woods, 2009), we believe most people would agree with the general sentiment of the rules; Asimov himself argued that these rules are not novel, but govern the design of any kind of tool humanity produces (Asimov, 1981) Asimov stated that he aimed to capture basic requirements of tools, namely, safety, compliance, and robustness, and his Three Laws are an attempt to explicitly express these properties in language. We do not argue that the proposed heuristics give a complete and sufficient account for ethical robot behavior Rather, at this stage, we consider properties such as safety, compliance, and robustness as secondary to the main robot mission. We will discuss extensions, challenges, and future work needed to fully realize this approach on actual robots
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