Ethical grey areas NOW. (Score 1)

Regarding whether what people to do in the privacy of their own home, or their own mind, is ethical and whether "we" allow it:

Don't we already have this problem with the Internet? It takes the cooperation of various law enforcement agencies, communications providers, cyber-investigators, community standards groups and others to "shut down" websites offering questionable content, or providing conduits to allow the trading of outright illegal materials (child pornography, etc).

It basically takes "the will of the people" exerted through their elected officials, some of whom may be participants in questionable behavior, to manage the impact of allowed individual freedoms. The whole structure of our current society is based upon the idea that civilized groups gather together in areas and decide TODAY what they will allow. BUT the standards are subject to change tomorrow.

A motorcycle movie playing in theaters now made me think about people living by their own rules and how outside of so-called civilized areas it is still a jungle. Look around a shopping mall next time you visit and ask yourself, 'what sort of candy coated, artificially sweetened society are we building for ourselves?' Take away the cooperation factor, or reduce its capacity through terrorism or warfare, and the fabric of society likely unravels and degenerates to survival by any means. Look at Iraq, they may not have had utilities and infrastructure to depend on BEFORE the war and simple freedoms were heavily restricted, but it is a regular flea market and swap meet society now.

Take a few million Americans and put them in tent cities and see how unethical behaviors become the core skill necessary for survival. I believe that without an extensive set of robotics ethics, we will eventually have groups of robots segregating themselves from human society because we are so "human". A collective group of robots is likely to form a "society" based on unwavering rules of behavior that will only be violated by defective logic or damaged circuitry and they aren't likely to tolerate the human element interferring with that society.

Unless, of course, we program the robots to tolerate it (abuse, disharmony) in the first place.