单选题 In 1981 Kenji Urada, a Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot"s powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot.
This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behaviour was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science fiction writer. The laws appeared in I, Robot, a book of short stories published in 1950 that inspired a recent Hollywood film. But decades later the laws, designed to prevent robots from harming people either through action or inaction, remain in the realm of fiction. Indeed, despite the introduction of improved safety mechanisms, robots have claimed many more victims since 1981.
With robots now poised to emerge from their industrial cages and to move into homes and workplaces, roboticists are concerned about the safety implications beyond the factory floor. To address these concerns, leading robot experts have come together to try to find ways to prevent robots from harming people. Inspired by the Pugwash Conferences—an international group of scientists, academics and activists founded in 1957 to campaign for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons—the new group of robo-ethicists met earlier this year in Genoa, Italy, and announced their initial findings in March at the meeting.
Should robots that are strong enough or heavy enough to crush people be allowed into homes? Is "system malfunction" a justifiable defence for a robotic fighter plane that violates the Geneva Convention and mistakenly fires on innocent civilians? These questions may seem esoteric but in the next few years they will become increasingly relevant. According to the UN Economic Commission for Europe"s World Robotics Survey, in 2002 the number of domestic and service robots more than tripled, nearly outstripping their industrial counterparts. By the end of 2003 there were more than 600,000 robot vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers. In light of all this, it is crucial that we start to think about safety and ethical guidelines now.
Regulating the behaviour of robots is going to become more difficult in the future, since they will increasingly have self learning mechanisms built into them, says Gianmarco Veruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, Italy. As a result, their behaviour will become impossible to predict fully, since they will not be behaving in predefined ways but will learn new behaviour as they go.

单选题 The word "gruesome" (Para. 2) probably means ______

单选题 By saying that "the Three Laws of Robotics...remain in the realm of fiction", the author means that ______

单选题 The new group of robo-ethicists are like the Pugwash Conferences in that they ______

单选题 The newly heightened concern about robot safety is caused by ______

单选题 It is difficult to develop safe robots because ______