There’s an interesting story over at Tim Worstall’s place about a new robot being developed by Elon Musk. The original story is paywalled at the Telegraph so I’ve linked to Mr Worstall’s article.

Apparently in order to make his new robot unthreatening to humans Mr Musk is going to make it unable to travel more than five miles per hour and build the robot in such a way that it can probably be overpowered. This is certainly an interesting variation on or extrapolation from Isaac Asimov’s ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ which are:

First Law

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

With the current state of robotic technology I doubt very much that an independent robot, ie one not connected to a larger network of computers, could have the abstract thinking power needed to make the sort of decisions that would need to be made in order to follow the Three Law of Robotics. Making the robot slow and vulnerable to overpowering looks to me to be one way of increasing the use of robotics but also creating the conditions for not putting humans at risk of harm from the robot.

Of course there are downsides to this idea. As commentators on Mr Worstall’s piece pointed out, the robot might not need rest and can travel at 5MPH for much longer than a human could. This is why making the robot relatively easy to overpower is in my view much more important than limiting its speed. However a more sure way of controlling an errant robot would be to make the machine limited in speed, make it easy to tackle by the average human and most of all give it a giant red ‘off’ switch, placed on an easily accessible part of the robot.