Robots discover the edge of pain

Pity the colleagues of Borut Povše, junior researcher at the University of Lubljana. Six of them agreed, and no doubt regretted, to allow a robot to punch them on the arm repeatedly to investigate how much pain a robot should be able to risk inflicting.

Human/robot environments such as car factories are a grey area for Asimov's laws

Isaac Asimov’s first rule of robotics (‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm’) does rather assume that a robot would know what kind of thing would cause an injury.

The simpler modified version of the first law (‘A robot may not harm a human being’) allows for collisions and low-level injuries that wouldn’t really count as harm in any reasonable test. This allow robots that work alongside humans in environments that might cause harm long-term to go about their business without throwing themselves between radiation sources and their co-workers. A point must exist, therefore, at which the level of injury to humans becomes unbearable for the robots and they have to step in, or at least stop what they’re doing that might be causing the problem.

If a threshold exists then someone has to decide where it should be, and in this case it’s Mr Povše, along with a robot that normally assembles coffee machines and Mr Povše’s long-suffering co-researchers.

Between them they categorised the pain caused by a series of collisions between arms and blunt or sharp tools from ‘painless’ to ‘unbearable pain’, and presented their findings to the Systems, Man and Cybernetics conference in Istanbul last week.

While such dedication to a rule set by a science fiction author seems commendable, not everyone in the field is convinced by the research. Michael Liebschner, a biomechanics specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, told New Scientist: “I would question using pain as an outcome measure. Pain is very subjective. Nobody cares if you have a stinging pain when a robot hits you. What you want to prevent is injury, because that’s when litigation starts.” Money trumps pain, every time.

Hat-tip: New Scientist