Click to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox.

Robots in a test in Reading, England have achieved 25% in being able to deceive humans into believing that they are themselves human. Professor Kevin Warwick at Reading University sums it up like this:

Alan Turing in 1950 set out the requirement that you would need at least 30% of interrogators to think that the machine was human for the machine to have passed the Turing Test. So what we’ve got today, the best machine, has got 25% of interrogators thinking it was a human – so we haven’t quite got to a machine passing the Turing Test.

Eliza and I spent time with Professor Warwick a while back and were deeply impressed by the huge strides robots had made in the last few years. An article I produced after that meeting is available to anyone who would like it.

Robots are now an increasing part of life in many activities. They are being built to be carers in hospitals and homes. They will perform certain surgical operations in the fairly near future. The line between the highly sophisticated computer programme and the robot is becoming blurred. Aircraft are increasingly controlled by their computers with potential over-rides from controllers on the ground. Car design is moving swiftly towards machine doing some of the thinking formerly left to the driver.

Developing thinking robots is not unlike bringing up children but with fewer tantrums. The mechanicals are relatively easy to define and implant. The moral choices are more difficult. This will increasingly become apparent as robot development strides ahead. The problem can be summed up as rules versus reason.

One of today’s difficulties with raising children is that we have tried to implant freedom into the human mind. For freedom to work in a socially acceptable way the possessor of it must have clear moral guidelines which fall short of, well, robotic behaviour.

The champions of acceptable moral behaviour and the people who used to at least try to be role models have both largely failed us, the former because they have not kept up with the issues over which moral choices have to be made, the latter because a celebrity culture has left us thinking that display is more important than dignity.

Codes of ethics abound but they all miss the point that a creative, developing world needs some chaos as well as some order. In programming our robots with their moral standards let us hope that we can teach them the difference between constructive and destructive chaos.

It’s the only way we will harness the massive creative powers we now have becoming available for mankind’s benefit.