Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong (A Book Review)

From Metapsychology:

Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong is the first book-length discussion of issues arising in the nascent field of Machine Ethics, offered by two of its more veteran thinkers. The authors do an admirable job at using language accessible to an interdisciplinary audience, which also makes the book open to a more general public readership. It will be of interest to anyone concerned with the ethical, social, and engineering issues that accompany the quest to develop machines that can act autonomously out in the world.

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Wired For War

From The Armchair Generalist:

P.W. Singer has written a very interesting book in "Wired for War: The Robotic Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century." This is his third release in six years - impressive, considering the 438 pages of this tome. If you want a technical discussion and evaluation of the value of robots in war, this isn't the book for you. Instead, Singer takes a journey into the history of robotics, the military's past work with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and sudden love affair with robotics after 2003, the pros and cons of using robots in combat operations, and what the future might show.

Singer's success in this book is how he has addressed the social, technical, military, and ethical aspects of the robot revolution. It is a relatively recent technical explosion of activity, but as Singer shows, the social impact of robotics go back decades. Still, the desire to use unmanned systems to augment and replace human frailties has been strong, especially in warfare. The more recent advances in robotics, added to military concepts of operation in urban areas and social comfort with electronics, has led to a Revolution in Military Affairs - of sorts. We may not be there completely.

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