Artificial intelligence with ethical sense patented

[Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe@ugent.be>]

Hello,

Only in the US, for now at least: US patent 6,587,846. Claim 1:


"1. A means for enabling a computer to decode and simulate the use of 
affective language within an ongoing verbal interaction comprising the 
steps of:

(a) determining the precise motivational parameters of an ongoing 
verbal interaction through a matching procedure with a multi-part 
schematic complement of power pyramid definitions, and

(b) utilizing said determination for employing a further sequence of 
linguistic transformations predicted from said schematic complement of 
power pyramid definitions,

whereby enabling a computer to predict a next most probable response 
within an ongoing verbal interaction, or alternately, offering said 
next most probable response as originating directly from said computer, 
simulating artificial intelligence in an ethical mode."


Is there prior art for this? I doubt it, since the answer to the 
question "is it non-obvious to implement this?" is "sure it is!" Which 
is exactly why the company Cyberdyne Systems (currently working on its 
HAL-3 robotics system, http://www.cyberdyne.jp/ENG/index.html) 
apparently has absolutely no clue at all on how this would be 
practically feasible (probably because they were too busy watching SF 
movies).

The patent description contains "The Ten Ethical Laws of Robotics" (and 
two corollaries) such as


"(I) As personal authority, I will express my individualism within the 
guidelines of the four basic ego states (guilt, worry, nostalgia, and 
desire) to the exclusion of the corresponding vices (laziness, 
negligence, apathy, and indifference). "


Best of all, they perfectly describe how you can achieve this: all you 
need is an expert system which can determine the meaning of any 
voice-recognised sentence, separate short and long term memory storage, 
some probability analysers, a general-purpose sentence generator and a 
hint of Aristotle. It seems they forgot to mention the flux capacitor 
and warp field inversion effects though. Yes, Virginia, philosophy has 
definitely become a useful non-obvious technical tool-creating natural 
science of the third kind.

If you can ever write a program makes a machine worry or experience 
nostalgia,

a) congratulations and get ready for receiving the Turing Award ;
b) make sure you get a license from these guys. After all, they did all 
the thinking for you.


Jonas