“Are the killer robots coming, or aren’t they?” Sharon Weinberger recently asked in the WIRED blog “Danger Room.” In her post, Weinberger plays down fears that an army of autonomous killing machines is in our not-so-distant future. Instead, she says, it is “autonomization of weapons” more generally that is the real pressing issue:

If we ban “robots,” are we also banning any weapon that involve some form of non-human guidance or targeting, like the familiar Joint Direct Attack Munition, which provides an “autonomous, conventional bombing capability” using satellite navigation.

Sadly, the GPS constellation, last time I checked, is devoid of any conscience.

In short, we should be paying attention to ethical questions related to autonomization, but visions of roving bands of killing machines that decide for themselves who must live and die are pure fantasy, she says.

Aside from robot war machines, however, big advances are being made in the realm of robotics — and some of these advances are begging the question: What are the ground rules?

The government of South Korea has not wasted any time addressing these questions. In March 2007, the South Korean government announced that a Robot Ethics Charter is in the works. Conceived with the goal of preventing “robot abuse of humans and human abuse of robots,” the five-member team assembled to write the document includes futurists and a science fiction author.

The CURIOUS episode “Mind Brain Machine,” which premiered last October on Thirteen, looks at the cutting edge of robotics technology and explores the question of robot ethics.

Watch the full episode “Mind Brain Machine” online.