In the 1940s, sociologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark placed white and Black dolls in front of young children and asked them to do things like pick the doll that "looks bad" or "is a nice color." The doll test was invented to better understand the evil consequences of separate and unequal treatment on the self-esteem of Black children in the United States. Lawyers from the NAACP used the results to successfully argue in favor of the desegregation of US schools. Now AI researchers say robots may need to undergo similar tests to ensure they treat all people fairly. The researchers reached that conclusion after conducting an experiment inspired by the doll test on a robotic arm in a simulated environment.

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. How do you stop a robot from hurting people? Many existing robots, such as those assembling cars in factories, shut down immediately when a human comes near. But this quick fix wouldn't work for something like a self-driving car that might have to move to avoid a collision, or a care robot that might need to catch an old person if they fall. With robots set to become our servants, companions and co-workers, we need to deal with the increasingly complex situations this will create and the ethical and safety questions this will raise. Science fiction already envisioned this problem and has suggested various potential solutions.

It began three and a half billion years ago in a pool of muck, when a molecule made a copy of itself and so became the ultimate ancestor of all earthly life. It began four million years ago, when brain volumes began climbing rapidly in the hominid line. In less than thirty years, it will end. Jaan Tallinn stumbled across these words in 2007, in an online essay called Staring into the Singularity. The "it" was human civilisation. Humanity would cease to exist, predicted the essay's author, with the emergence of superintelligence, or AI, that surpasses human-level intelligence in a broad array of areas. Tallinn, an Estonia-born computer programmer, has a background in physics and a propensity to approach life like one big programming problem.

Instead of laws to restrict robot behavior, robots should be empowered to pick the best solution for any given scenario.

It used to be that even sophisticated mobile robots could be easily defeated by using (say) a table to block its way. The robot would sense the table, categorize it as an obstacle, try to plan a path around it, and then give up when its planner fails. This works because robots generally don't know what most objects are, or how they work, or what you can do with them: They just get turned into obstacles to be avoided, because in most cases, that's the easiest and safest thing to do. You can't normally use a table across a hallway to deter a human, because humans understand that tables are physical objects that can be moved, and the human will just pull the table out of the way and keep on going. Even if the table doesn't behave exactly the way we'd expect it to (like, one of the wheels is stuck), we can adapt, and figure it out.