The first of these two papers, The Autonomous Peace Officer, was presented at the Institution of Engineering and Technology in July 2008 as part of a conference on autonomous systems.
It is, essentially, a systems design feasibility study for an agile, responsive, sentient, anthropomorphic machine, an Autonomous Peace Officer (APO) for Peace Operations in military and civil environments.
Not, you understand, that I am proposing such a machine as being, shall we say, a good idea. Yet, on the other hand, it is interesting to see if you could actually design such a complex thing, one that would have to interact sensibly and reasonably with people… tricky!
The paper was met with stunned silence… oh well.
The second paper, Autonomous Systems Behaviour, forms Chapter 3 of the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Complex Systems Design and Management, CSDM 2011, held in Paris in December of that year.
Autonomous Systems Behaviour addresses the question, of making machines more human-like, so that they could act and interact with people on a more comfortable basis. Could we, perhaps, make machines that behaved in some respects like people, making acceptably ethical decisions and moral judgments, even exhibiting sympathy and empathy with victims and patients? Even if we could do these things, would it be wise to do so? Or, would we, in effect, be creating beings with similar underlying flaws to Asimov’s infamous Robots?