Humanist just had an intriguing post about The First International Symposium on Roboethics. This is being hosted by the Home > Benvenuti” href=”http://www.scuoladirobotica.it/”>Scuola di Robotica (School of Robotics) in Genoa which describes itself as a “CyberSchool. I wouldn’t have thought robotics and ethics were mature enough as an area for a symposium, but the section on the site on Roboethics Debate changed my mind. Since Kurzweil published The Age of Spritual Machines the debate has shifted from science fiction circles (Azimov’s 3 + 1 rules) to academic circles.
I should note that the Debate section of the Roboethics site, while interesting, has some inaccuracies. I don’t think Ray Kurzweil was “one of the develop of the Java programming language”. That would be Bill Joy.