Don’t worry, our robot overlords will protect us from Ebola. Right?

Posted by admin on Nov 18, 2014 at 9:35 pm America/Chicago

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recently organized a symposium of top robotics experts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute to brainstorm how field robots could be used in future Ebola-like pandemics. While the researchers came up with a number of innovative short-term and long-term ideas for how robots could be used to fight Ebola – everything from cleaning and decontaminating rooms to actually administering IVs to humans under medical treatment — there are still a number of important issues to clarify before we hand over the task of fighting Ebola to the robots. On the surface, of course, handing over the dirty work of cleaning up after an Ebola outbreak to the robots sounds like a no-brainer. Instead of putting humans into harm’s way, why not just send in a robot? Robots can’t develop symptoms from Ebola, they are relatively easy to disinfect (except for their wheels), they dutifully carry out tasks without talking back and they can dispose of hazardous waste efficiently. Scratch the surface, though, and you can start to see the moral and philosophical questions that arise once robots start doing more than just grunt-level decontamination work. In short, everything changes once robots also become human-like caregivers of Ebola patients rather than just repurposed industrial robots. Even assuming that wise and highly moral technologists have created robots according to something approximating Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, there still exists all kinds of potential for things to go wrong as robots go about trying to observe these laws. Just read any of Asimov’s “Robot” stories  (or, better yet, watch the Will Smith movie) to understand how things might go awry. For more information, check out washingtonpost.com