{"id":5306,"date":"2014-11-11T07:28:23","date_gmt":"2014-11-11T14:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5306"},"modified":"2014-11-11T07:28:23","modified_gmt":"2014-11-11T14:28:23","slug":"when-roombas-kill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5306","title":{"rendered":"When Roombas kill"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"roomba\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jenny Shank interviews<\/a> me about The Glass Cage<\/em> over at MediaShift. The conversation gets into some topics that haven’t been covered much elsewhere, including my suggestion that\u00a0Roomba, the automated vacuum cleaner, provides an early and ever so\u00a0slightly ominous example of robot morality (or lack thereof). “Roomba makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect,” I write in the book. “It gobbles both, indiscriminately. If a cricket crosses its path, the cricket gets sucked to its death. A lot of people, when vacuuming, will also run over the cricket. They place no value on a bug\u2019s life, at least not when the bug is an intruder in their home. But other people will stop what they\u2019re doing, pick up the cricket, carry it to the door, and set it loose. …\u00a0When we set Roomba loose on a carpet, we cede to it the power to make moral choices on our behalf.”<\/p>\n

Here’s the relevant bit from the interview:<\/p>\n

Shank: <\/strong>\u201cThe Glass Cage\u201d made explicit for me a number of problems with automation that I had been vaguely worried about. But one thing that I had never worried about until reading \u201cThe Glass Cage\u201d was the morality of the Roomba. You write, \u201cRoomba makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect.\u201d Why is it so easy to overlook the fact, as I did, that when a Roomba vacuums indiscriminately, it\u2019s following a moral code?<\/p>\n

Carr:\u00a0<\/strong>It\u2019s easier not to think about it, frankly. The workings of automated machines often raise tricky moral questions. We tend to ignore those gray areas in order to enjoy the conveniences the machines provide without suffering any guilt. But I don\u2019t think we\u2019re going to be able to remain blind to the moral complexities raised by robots and other autonomous machines much longer. As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they\u2019re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can\u2019t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it\u2019s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers. We\u2019re going to have to figure out how to give machines moral codes even if it\u2019s not something we want to think about.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Image: Juliette Culver<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jenny Shank interviews me about The Glass Cage over at MediaShift. The conversation gets into some topics that haven’t been covered much elsewhere, including my suggestion that\u00a0Roomba, the automated vacuum cleaner, provides an early and ever so\u00a0slightly ominous example of robot morality (or lack thereof). “Roomba makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5306"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5309,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5306\/revisions\/5309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}