Robots

Navy looking at teaching robots how to behave

The rise of artificial intelligence has long stoked fears of killer robots like the “Terminator,” and early versions of military automatons are already in the battlefield. Now the Navy is looking into how it can teach machines to do the right thing.

“We’ve been looking at different ways that we can have people interact with autonomous systems,” Marc Steinberg, an Office of Naval Research manager, said in a phone interview this month.

The Navy is funding a slew of projects at universities and institutes that look at how to train such systems, including stopping robots from harming people.

In 1979, a Ford autoworker in Michigan became the first person killed by a robot when he was struck in the head by the arm of a 1-ton production-line machine, according to Guinness World Records. More recently, police in Dallas used a robot to deliver a bomb that killed the shooter who opened fire on officers at a Black Lives Matter protest.

Science-fiction author Isaac Asimov’s 1950 book of short stories “I, Robot” is credited with creating the three laws of robotics that include a “robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”