Robotics: a part of our life today

I watch on television with fascination, the commercials that show a Ford automobile parallel parking on a street. I remember how many practice hours I spent learning to put my father’s 65 Chrysler into a tight space.
We have seen robot vacuum cleaners. We have played with robot toys and marveled at R2-D2 in Star Wars. R2-D2 was a human. Today we are closing in on having robots become part of our every day lives.
Perhaps the first robots were the metal adding machines. As long as you punched in the numbers correctly, the column of numbers being added was correct. It was far faster than mentally adding each column. Later electronic calculators speeded the process up and as Texas Instruments added more functions they made the work of engineers and students much easier. They were truly a first generation of a robot.
When we began putting men into space, much of the work was programmed into very small computers by today’s standards. The first astronauts were more hands on. Today, everything is controlled by robotic functions.
When you strap yourself into a seat in one of our modern planes, the pilot’s function is to taxi the plane to the take off runway and then when the flight has landed to taxi the plane to the next gate. The take off, flight, landing is all handled by robotic computers that constantly monitor everything happening in the flight.
Similarly, when you start your car engine, an automatic robotic system check does an inspection of the vehicles.
Robots are making their way into our everyday life.
We send robot submarines to the deepest parts of the ocean to explore and discover new animal species. We might control them from the surface, but the real machine is far below the surface. Through war, we now created a whole new set of robots to spy, to carry, to infiltrate and to make war on enemies.
From a distant country we can order a “Drone” flying some eleven miles high to attack a home or vehicle.
We can operate trains without an engineer being aboard and send it across the country. Google has perfected a car that can travel up and down streets photographing everything that it sees in 360 degrees.
But in the future, as robots take on more human responsibilities how are we going to program them to operate with a set of morals and ethics. Today if a truck is travelling down a highway and the driver sees a group of five people standing and blocking the trucks path, and a single person in the oncoming lane, and is unable to stop in time, the driver is faced with a difficult decision.
In the future, how would you develop the logic, ethics and morals for a robot to handle From pg 2
that decision? In war a drone may hover, and realize that an enemy is in a home, and may suspect that innocent men, women and children are also in that home, the ethical dilemma for the drone will be whether or not to attack.
A robot soldier not controlled by a human would have to make a decision about whether the person they are facing is an enemy soldier or a terrified civilian.
We will have to think about how we make them more rational, clear thinking than ourselves. What qualities do we want these future robots to have and use? What moral judgments do we want them to make? Will we want to put restrictions on their use?
Successful technologies are quickly adopted. And robots will become more a part of our everyday life. We just have to think about what controls we wish to place on them.