Institutional Robotics and Norms in Multi-agent Systems

Taking science-fiction movies and literature as source for unreal and unspecified related work, we have to mention Asimov’ Laws of Robotics.

The four laws stated:

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

In my humble opinion, Asimov’ Laws have an open interpretation, are not politically correct and require a more specific update.
For instance, how many human beings are allowed by the First Law to be killed by robots to save humanity from pollution without “harming humanity”?
Are cars and gas trucks allowed to be destroyed by robots to save humanity from pollution?
Are gas stations allowed to be controlled by robots in order to prevent us from using them?.

Then, norms also tend to get obsolete so we need a regulated mechanism to create and modify norms. This is were meta-norms are useful.

Meta-norms are norms referring to other norms. For instance, Robert Axelrod [1] provided the example of having willingness to punish someone who did not enforce a norm. Thus, we will use meta-norms to regulate how to regulate robots.

More about the application of meta-norms in Institutional Robotics will be presented in my next paper so please be tuned.

References

Institutional Robotics and Norms in Multi-agent systems by Andrés García-Camino is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Spain License.
Based on a work at blog.garcia-camino.es.