New York City councilmember Ben Kallos says he "watched in horror" last month when city police responded to a hostage situation in the Bronx using Boston Dynamics' Digidog, a remotely operated robotic dog equipped with surveillance cameras. Pictures of the Digidog went viral on Twitter, in part due to their uncanny resemblance with world-ending machines in the Netflix sci-fi series Black Mirror. Now Kallos is proposing what may be the nation's first law banning police from owning or operating robots armed with weapons. "I don't think anyone was anticipating that they'd actually be used by the NYPD right now," Kallos says. "I have no problem with using a robot to defuse a bomb, but it has to be the right use of a tool and the right type of circumstance."

View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-ethical... Self-driving cars are already cruising the streets today. And while these cars will ultimately be safer and cleaner than their manual counterparts, they can't completely avoid accidents altogether. How should the car be programmed if it encounters an unavoidable accident?

When writing the screenplay for 1968's 2001, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were confident that something resembling the sentient, humanlike HAL 9000 computer would be possible by the film's namesake year. That's because the leading AI experts of the time were equally confident. Clarke and Kubrick took the scientific community's predictions to their logical conclusion, that an AI could have not only human charm but human frailty as well: HAL goes mad and starts offing the crew. But HAL was put in an impossible situation, forced to hide critical information from its (his?) coworkers and ordered to complete the mission to Jupiter no matter what. "I'm afraid, Dave," says the robot as it's being dismantled by the surviving astronaut.