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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

That was actually the article's point - by releasing this robot of death, you cede moral authority to it. Or by your reckoning, you make the decision to kill; the robot just disguises that fact.

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But it's sensationally worded. That's true any time we take an action that may have unintended consequences, and what that action is — whether it's releasing a robot vacuum cleaner, striking a log with an axe, or writing a book with potentially dangerous ideas — is irrelevant. My point is that smart people say dumb things when recent technology is involved.

The idea is, we've not had robots to do our killing for us in the past. This is something new. You can kill (bugs in this case) without being present or even knowing its happening. Worth an article I think.

  The idea is, we've not had robots to do our
  killing for us in the past.

A bit of trivia I picked up in a robotics class: Most of the common definitions of 'robot' include cruise missiles, which we've had since the 1970s at least.

Setting out poison, traps, or mines, as we've done for centuries, is pretty similar; it's meant to kill in our absence, and can easily go wrong.

I think, though, that you're getting caught up in quibbling over choice of words and, in the process, missing the point of the article. It's not really advancing the conversation, it's just pedantry for the sake of pedantry.

There is an interesting difference, though it's not the one you've chosen to frame your comments around. It doesn't matter that the Roomba has no more moral agency than a sack of hammers. That's a point the author passes by on the way to the real crux of the article, which is that autonomous machines have a way of masking this fact in a way that tricks humans into ceding their own moral agency. That example of a person who wouldn't knowingly vacuum over a cricket but happily uses a Roomba is just a less politically-charged proxy for the question of autonomous military robots carrying weapons.

The point is that "unintended consequences" are much more likely with complex systems. When you wield an axe, the consequences are fairly direct. When you leave home for the 101st time after buying a Roomba, you are still responsible for the consequences, but they are much harder to keep track of.

Sensationally worded?!? You're saying there's a chance the headline "When Roombas Kill" could have even a single trait in common with linkbait? Outrageous!

This is a valid point, but there is another interpretation that once technology advances to the point that its pure magic to the general public, the general public can no longer have an intelligent discussion about the morality of their vacuum cleaner, they have to go all mythological, which occasionally is going to look pretty comical to the enlightened non-general public.

Or another way to look at it, is enough technological progress and specialization results inherently in a fragmentation of what morality means because the concept can't fit the same way in everyone's head (square peg round hole). Its a natural result that some fraction of the population will just meaninglessly babble while other fractions laugh. Its possible to interpret this has already begin with respect to evolution, geology/age of earth, climate change, stem cell research, euthanasia, gay marriage, etc...

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