ISAAC ASIMOV would probably have been horrified at the
experiments under way in a robotics lab in Slovenia. There, a
powerful robot has been hitting people over and over again in a
bid to induce anything from mild to unbearable pain - in
apparent defiance of the late sci-fi sage's famed first law of
robotics, which states that "a robot may not injure a human
being". But the robo-battering is all in a good cause, insists
Borut Povše, who has ethical approval for the work from the
University of Ljubljana, where he conducted the research. He has
persuaded six male colleagues to let a powerful industrial robot
repeatedly strike them on the arm, to assess human-robot pain
thresholds. It's not because he thinks the first law of robotics
is too constraining to be of any practical use, but rather to
help future robots adhere to the rule. "Even robots designed to
Asimov's laws can collide with people. We are trying to make
sure that when they do, the collision is not too powerful,"
Povše says. "We are taking the first