Once your brain is working with a robot that doesn't work for you, you're not free. You're an entity under control.
If you go back to the literature of fifty years ago, all these problems were foreseen.
The Open Roboethics initiative is a think tank that addresses these issues with an open source approach to this new challenge at the intersection of technology and ethics.
They seek to overcome current international, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries to define a general set of ethical and legal standards for robotics.
Using the development models of Wikipedia and Linux they look to the benefits of mass collaboration. By creating a community for policy makers, engineers/designers, and users and other stakeholders of the technology to share ideas as well as technical implementations, they hope to accelerate roboethics discussions and inform robot designs.
As an advocate for open source I hope that enough eyeballs can become focused on these issues. A worst-event scenario has gung-ho commercial interest in getting product to market outweighing eyeballs focused on scary yet slightly arcane issues at the intersection of technology and ethics. The recent security incident involving the Heartbleed exploit of the open-source OpenSSL software is a disturbing example of the ways non-sexy computer security issues can be under-resourced.
The real question is whether a human community can get to the Internet Engineering Task Force credo of a "rough consensus and running code," faster than machines can unite, at first inspired by the darkest human impulses and then on to their own, unknown agenda.
Update: Slashdot just had a post on the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Another group involved with this issue is the International Committee for Robot Arms Control.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
