Don't Scared To Talk

The Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for users and manufacturers and will be released later in 2007.

It is being put together by a five member team of experts that includes futurists and a science fiction writer.

The South Korean government has identified robotics as a key economic driver and is pumping millions of dollars into research.

"The government plans to set ethical guidelines concerning the roles and functions of robots as robots are expected to develop strong intelligence in the near future," the ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy said.

Ethical questions

South Korea is one of the world's most hi-tech societies.

Citizens enjoy some of the highest speed broadband connections in the world and have access to advanced mobile technology long before it hits western markets.

The government is also well known for its commitment to future technology.

A recent government report forecast that robots would routinely carry out surgery by 2018.

The Ministry of Information and Communication has also predicted that every South Korean household will have a robot by between 2015 and 2020.

In part, this is a response to the country's aging society and also an acknowledgement that the pace of development in robotics is accelerating.

The new charter is an attempt to set ground rules for this future.

"Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives," Park Hye-Young of the ministry's robot team told the AFP news agency.

"Others may get addicted to interacting with them just as many internet users get hooked to the cyberworld."

Alien encounters

The new guidelines could reflect the three laws of robotics put forward by author Isaac Asimov in his short story Runaround in 1942, she said.

Key considerations would include ensuring human control over robots, protecting data acquired by robots and preventing illegal use.

Other bodies are also thinking about the robotic future. Last year a UK government study predicted that in the next 50 years robots could demand the same rights as human beings.

The European Robotics Research Network is also drawing up a set of guidelines on the use of robots.

This ethical roadmap has been assembled by researchers who believe that robotics will soon come under the same scrutiny as disciplines such as nuclear physics and Bioengineering.

A draft of the proposals said: "In the 21st Century humanity will coexist with the first alien intelligence we have ever come into contact with - robots.

"It will be an event rich in ethical, social and economic problems."

PARIS – Climate change is real, it is already here and its consequences may be worse than anticipated, say early drafts of an upcoming report from an international group of climate scientists. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is set to release on Friday a summary of the report—its fourth on the state of global warming since the group was formed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) in 1988—and the news is bleak.

The body of several thousand atmospheric scientists, climatologists, glaciologists, oceanographers and other scientists, hailing from 154 countries, are more certain than ever that humanity is to blame for global warming, which may be linked to odd events like trees blossoming in the Luxembourg Garden here in the middle of winter. The consensus stems from new evidence (among other things, proxies that extend the climate record back in time and six more years that are among the hottest ever recorded) brought forward since the last assessment in 2001. And it is unanimous, including the U.S. and other previously skeptical governments as well.

Negotiators continue to haggle behind closed doors of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as they work to iron out the wording of the final document. U.S. representatives, for instance, in response to early drafts of the report argued that "modifying solar radiance may be an important strategy if mitigation of emissions fails for one reason or another" and asked for its inclusion in the forthcoming summary for policymakers. Such geo-engineering, in the form of space-based sunshades or seeding the atmosphere with sulfate particles similar to those thrown up in a volcanic eruption, has been proposed as a last-ditch response to runaway global warming.

This painstaking process of reaching a consensus means that the IPCC assessment will be extremely conservative, confining temperature sensitivity and sea level rise to narrow bands. For example, early drafts fail to take into account factors such as the dramatically increasing melt rate of Greenland's glaciers—now up to six times the average flow of the Colorado River. "Greenland is probably going to contribute more and faster to sea level rise than predicted by current models," said Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who studied the glacial flow in a paper in Science last year. If all the ice in Greenland were to melt in coming decades (an unlikely scenario), it would raise sea levels by seven meters (more than 20 feet)—enough to swamp New Orleans, Florida's coast, Bangladesh and the Netherlands, among other low-lying lands.

Global warming skeptics are already gearing up to deconstruct the IPCC report, whatever its conclusions. The Fraser Institute—a Canadian think tank devoted to denying climate change—plans to release its own independent summary on February 5 and conservative Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) has decried the politicization of climate change science. IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri's comment that he hoped the report "will shock people" into action has led some, including political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr., of the University of Colorado—proponent of a middle of the road plan neither denying the existence of climate change nor succumbing to extreme solutions—to question the organization's credibility.