Robots Show Us Who We Are

In 2016, Alan Winfield gave an "IdeasLab" talk at the World Economic Forum about building ethical robots. "Could we build a moral machine?" Behind him, pictured on a flatscreen TV, was one of the bots Winfield used in his experiments--a short, cutesy, white and blue human-like machine. Just a few years ago, he said, he believed it to be impossible: You couldn't build a robot capable of acting on the basis of ethical rules. But that was before he realized what you could get robots to do if they had an imagination--or less gradiosely a "consequence engine," a simulated internal model of itself and the world outside. Winfield showed clips of his experiments at the Bristol Robotics Lab in England.