‘Robots Right Lane Only’ road sign leaves community baffled

A strange road sign along a highway in Lexington, Massachusetts, has drivers and bikers scratching their heads. "Robots Right Lane Only," the sign reads, along with an illustrated cartoon robot head and a directional arrow pointing to the right. The only clue to the sign's origins is a sticker on the back that reads "Lexford Department of Robotic Affairs."Betty Gau, the chair of the Lexington Bicycle Advisory Committee — which is responsible for putting up signs along the road's bikeway — noted the sign's appearance in May. The committee ultimately decided to leave the sign up because it was "amusing and clever and harmless," according to Boston.com. But still, the origins - and meaning - remain a mystery.The committee likes the sign's message, which tells everyone to stay to the right. A sign reading 'Robots Right Lane Only' created by the Lexford Department of Robotic Affairs speculative fiction project. A real-world sign bearing the image was installed along a highway in Lexington, Massachusetts by unknown creators (Lexford Department of Robotics)“The bikeway is for everyone, there’s a variety of users from tricyclists to walkers to runners, we want everyone to be safe, even robots, they should stay to the right too,” Gau told the outlet.The sticker on the back refers to a fiction project that imagines a combined town of Lexington and Bedford — hence the Lexford name — in the year 2075. The aforementioned "Department of Robotic Affairs" is the fictional agency that oversees “the registration, compliance, behavioral monitoring, and lawful decommission of all autonomous robotic units operating within the Commonwealth.” The project's story describes a world in which robots have largely taken over the world's share of labor and have started demanding equal rights. It tells of robot protests, demanding to be set free from the "tyranny" of the Department of Robotic Affairs. The speculative fiction project touches on questions that ethicists and even the broader public are grappling with as tech companies, their boosters, and their deep-pocket funders insist that AI will change the face of labor, leaving the bulk of humanity twiddling their thumbs on the unemployment line. John Basl, a Northeastern University philosophy professor who studies Artificial Intelligence ethics, spoke to Boston.com about the questions raised by the project and said he'd grappled with them earlier in his career. “Early on I thought a lot about, could we create AI that was conscious, and what would that mean ethically?” he said. “Would we have obligations to it? Under what conditions? What kind of problems would that raise? Are we prepared for it?”He said that it's unclear right now if creating a truly conscious AI is even possible, but said that if it did happen, humans would have moral obligations to it in the same way a parent might to a child. “Once we create a being, let’s just assume we create a being that has mental states kind of like ours, then we owe it the same thing we owe each other, and to treat it otherwise or attack it otherwise would be akin to racism or sexism,” he said. For now though, the sign is just a goofy picture of a robot head that is, intended or not, helping to keep bikeway users safe by reminding them to stay to the right.