Does your vacuum cleaner have human rights?!

“To you, a robot is just a robot. But you haven't worked with them. You don't know them. They're a cleaner, better breed than we are…” I, Robot (paperback edition)


And so said Isaac Asimov, the writer that actually coined the termed robotics, through his characters in his short collection of stories named I, Robot. Well, perhaps they took him too seriously, because today the world has demanded to make an ethical charter to prevent abuse of robotics!

In South Korea, a committee has been formed to debate and formulate such a charter that will be released sometime in 2007. European Robotics Research Network have similar plans; and if you would like to know, no less than the government of United Kingdom has stated that in the next 50 years robots will be able to compete for the same legal, emotional and physical rights that are applicable to the human race! Surely, no one is taking artificial intelligence as an equivalent of fake IQ, because with the sort of advancements like Honda’s Asimo (his name that seemingly is inspired by the writer Asimov) or the simplistic yet amazing Roomba – a vacuum that has sensors and can clean up your house without your supervision – is indeed very real!

In fact, it has been projected that in South Korea alone from 2015 to 2020 every household would be having a robot in their house (reminds one of Robin William’s Bicentennial Man). The laws that shall form the base of the Ethics Charter are from Isaac Asimov’s novel Runaround. This was one of the short stories in I, Robot, which for the first time formalised a law for robots; mind you at that time, i.e. 1942 when the stories were written, this was a futuristic concept and no real gadgets as such had been developed.

The laws are:

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

THE DEBATE

Now, all this seems fine, the real debate centres upon whether robots, which were developed as tools to help our race, deserve to become in fact a de-facto human? Before we jump to conclusion, look at the origin of the word. Robot actually comes from a Czechoslovakian word for slave/forced labor that is robota or robotnik. So does that mean Nelson Mandela has found his new campaign statement? Or is there going to be a Bhartiya Robot Party in India one day?

The answer perhaps lies in 322 B.C. As the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote...

“If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it... then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.”

Author’s view: I demand the right today as a human being to reject my personal computer to upgrade to a fancy, Wi-Max laptop with teraflops worth of RAM and hard disk. I demand the right to kick my vacuum cleaner when it gets stuck on my carpet. I demand the right to throw away my robotic puppy, when I get bored. I demand the right to upgrade! AND NO, upgrading the human race to robots is not acceptable. So, though according to Darwin, we might not be the fittest when compared to robots, but we invented them and I demand the right to remain MASTER!


PS: In case anybody would like to learn about I, Robot and its short stories you could check it out at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A455898, which has small write ups on the same. Keep reading!