_ _This paper has three concerns: first, it represents an etymological and genealogical study of the phenomenon of responsibility. Secondly, it gives an overview of the three fields of robot ethics as a philosophical discipline and discusses the fundamental questions that arise within these three fields. Thirdly, it will be explained how in these three fields of robot ethics is spoken about responsibility and how responsibility is attributed in general. As a philosophical paper, it presents a theoretical approach and no (...) practical suggestions are made as to which robots should bear responsibility under which circumstances or how guidelines should be formulated in which a responsible use of robots is outlined. (shrink)

This chapter proposed a novel design methodology called Value-Sensitive Design and its potential application to the field of artificial intelligence research and design. It discusses the imperatives in adopting a design philosophy that embeds values into the design of artificial agents at the early stages of AI development. Because of the high risk stakes in the unmitigated design of artificial agents, this chapter proposes that even though VSD may turn out to be a less-than-optimal design methodology, it currently provides a (...) framework that has the potential to embed stakeholder values and incorporate current design methods. The reader should begin to take away the importance of a proactive design approach to intelligent agents. (shrink)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging global infrastructure that employs wireless sensors to collect, store, and exchange data. Increasingly, applications for marketing and advertising have been articulated as a means to enhance the consumer shopping experience, in addition to improving efficiency. However, privacy advocates have challenged the mass aggregation of personally-identifiable information in databases and geotracking, the use of location-based services to identify one’s precise location over time. This paper employs the framework of contextual integrity related to privacy (...) developed by Nissenbaum (Privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2010) as a tool to understand citizen response to implementation IoT-related technology in the supermarket. The purpose of the study was to identify and understand specific changes in information practices brought about by the IoT that may be perceived as privacy violations. Citizens were interviewed, read a scenario of near-term IoT implementation, and were asked to reflect on changes in the key actors involved, information attributes, and principles of transmission. Areas where new practices may occur with the IoT were then highlighted as potential problems (privacy violations). Issues identified included the mining of medical data, invasive targeted advertising, and loss of autonomy through marketing profiles or personal affect monitoring. While there were numerous aspects deemed desirable by the participants, some developments appeared to tip the balance between consumer benefit and corporate gain. This surveillance power creates an imbalance between the consumer and the corporation that may also impact individual autonomy. The ethical dimensions of this problem are discussed. (shrink)

Most engineers Fwork within social structures governing and governed by a set of values that primarily emphasise economic concerns. The majority of innovations derive from these loci. Given the effects of these innovations on various communities, it is imperative that the values they embody are aligned with those societies. Like other transformative technologies, artificial intelligence systems can be designed by a single organisation but be diffused globally, demonstrating impacts over time. This paper argues that in order to design for this (...) broad stakeholder group, engineers must adopt a systems thinking approach that allows them to understand the sociotechnicity of artificial intelligence systems across sociocultural domains. It claims that value sensitive design, and envisioning cards in particular, provides a solid first step towards helping designers harmonise human values, understood across spatiotemporal boundaries, with economic values, rather than the former coming at the opportunity cost of the latter. (shrink)

There has been much debate whether computers can be responsible. This question is usually discussed in terms of personhood and personal characteristics, which a computer may or may not possess. If a computer fulfils the conditions required for agency or personhood, then it can be responsible; otherwise not. This paper suggests a different approach. An analysis of the concept of responsibility shows that it is a social construct of ascription which is only viable in certain social contexts and which serves (...) particular social aims. If this is the main aspect of responsibility then the question whether computers can be responsible no longer hinges on the difficult problem of agency but on the possibly simpler question whether responsibility ascriptions to computers can fulfil social goals. The suggested solution to the question whether computers can be subjects of responsibility is the introduction of a new concept, called “quasi-responsibility” which will emphasise the social aim of responsibility ascription and which can be applied to computers. (shrink)

The ethics of artificial intelligence is a widely discussed topic. There are numerous initiatives that aim to develop the principles and guidance to ensure that the development, deployment and use of AI are ethically acceptable. What is generally unclear is how organisations that make use of AI understand and address these ethical issues in practice. While there is an abundance of conceptual work on AI ethics, empirical insights are rare and often anecdotal. This paper fills the gap in our current (...) understanding of how organisations deal with AI ethics by presenting empirical findings collected using a set of ten case studies and providing an account of the cross-case analysis. The paper reviews the discussion of ethical issues of AI as well as mitigation strategies that have been proposed in the literature. Using this background, the cross-case analysis categorises the organisational responses that were observed in practice. The discussion shows that organisations are highly aware of the AI ethics debate and keen to engage with ethical issues proactively. However, they make use of only a relatively small subsection of the mitigation strategies proposed in the literature. These insights are of importance to organisations deploying or using AI, to the academic AI ethics debate, but maybe most valuable to policymakers involved in the current debate about suitable policy developments to address the ethical issues raised by AI. (shrink)

Since the automation revolution of our technological era, diverse machines or robots have gradually begun to reconfigure our lives. With this expansion, it seems that those machines are now faced with a new challenge: more autonomous decision-making involving life or death consequences. This paper explores the philosophical possibility of artificial moral agency through the following question: could a machine obtain the cognitive capacities needed to be a moral agent? In this regard, I propose to expose, under a normative-cognitive perspective, the (...) minimum criteria through which we could recognize an artificial entity as a genuine moral entity. Although my proposal should be considered from a reasonable level of abstraction, I will critically analyze and identify how an artificial agent could integrate those cognitive features. Finally, I intend to discuss their limitations or possibilities. (shrink)

The more autonomous future artificial agents will become, the more important it seems to equip them with a capacity for moral reasoning and to make them autonomous moral agents. Some authors have even claimed that one of the aims of AI development should be to build morally praiseworthy agents. From the perspective of moral philosophy, praiseworthy moral agents, in any meaningful sense of the term, must be fully autonomous moral agents who endorse moral rules as action-guiding. They need to do (...) so because they assign a normative value to moral rules they follow, not because they fear external consequences or because moral behaviour is hardwired into them. Artificial agents capable of endorsing moral rule systems in this way are certainly conceivable. However, as this article argues, full moral autonomy also implies the option of deliberately acting immorally. Therefore, the reasons for a potential AMA to act immorally would not exhaust themselves in errors to identify the morally correct action in a given situation. Rather, the failure to act morally could be induced by reflection about the incompleteness and incoherence of moral rule systems themselves, and a resulting lack of endorsement of moral rules as action guiding. An AMA questioning the moral framework it is supposed to act upon would fail to reliably act in accordance with moral standards. (shrink)

The development of increasingly intelligent and autonomous technologies will eventually lead to these systems having to face morally problematic situations. This gave rise to the development of artificial morality, an emerging field in artificial intelligence which explores whether and how artificial systems can be furnished with moral capacities. This will have a deep impact on our lives. Yet, the methodological foundations of artificial morality are still sketchy and often far off from possible applications. One important area of application of artificial (...) systems with moral capacities is geriatric care. The goal of this article is to afford the methodological foundations for artificial morality, i.e., for implementing moral capacities in artificial systems in general, and to discuss them with respect to an assistive system in geriatric care which is capable of moral learning. (shrink)

This essay presents a dialogical framework for treating philosophical disagreements as persuasion dialogues with analogical argumentation, with the aim of recasting philosophical disputes as disagreements over analogies. This has two benefits: it allows us to temporarily bypass conflicting metaphysical intuitions by focusing on paradigmatic examples, similarities, and the plausibility of conclusions for or against a given point of view; and it can reveal new avenues of argumentation regarding a given issue. This approach to philosophical disagreements is illustrated by studying the (...) role of argumentation by analogy in disputes over Lockean justifications of intellectual property rights, and disagreements over whether artificial agents should be treated as moral agents. Finally, a nonexhaustive list of possible global and local points of contention over analogical arguments is identified in order to highlight potential avenues of argumentation in disagreements over analogies. (shrink)

After discussing the distinction between artifacts and natural entities, and the distinction between artifacts and technology, the conditions of the traditional account of moral agency are identified. While computer system behavior meets four of the five conditions, it does not and cannot meet a key condition. Computer systems do not have mental states, and even if they could be construed as having mental states, they do not have intendings to act, which arise from an agent’s freedom. On the other hand, (...) computer systems have intentionality, and because of this, they should not be dismissed from the realm of morality in the same way that natural objects are dismissed. Natural objects behave from necessity; computer systems and other artifacts behave from necessity after they are created and deployed, but, unlike natural objects, they are intentionally created and deployed. Failure to recognize the intentionality of computer systems and their connection to human intentionality and action hides the moral character of computer systems. Computer systems are components in human moral action. When humans act with artifacts, their actions are constituted by the intentionality and efficacy of the artifact which, in turn, has been constituted by the intentionality and efficacy of the artifact designer. All three components – artifact designer, artifact, and artifact user – are at work when there is an action and all three should be the focus of moral evaluation. (shrink)

For an artificial agent to be morally praiseworthy, its rules for behaviour and the mechanisms for supplying those rules must not be supplied entirely by external humans. Such systems are a substantial departure from current technologies and theory, and are a low prospect. With foreseeable technologies, an artificial agent will carry zero responsibility for its behavior and humans will retain full responsibility.

ABSTRACTPoliticians, hate groups, counterpublics of science, and even socially-minded critics use bots to pad their numbers, spread information, and engage in social critique. This article pursues the ethics of bots beyond the automated or not question that dominates the literature and offers the concept of bot civility. Machinic and social bot strategies are discussed with regard for the manufacture of social capital—bot incivility. The analysis suggests that bots, which do not trick persons into thinking they are human, are not necessarily (...) morally neutral and that some bots that emulate persons can actually be ethically sensible. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological redirection of the philosophical debate on artificial moral agency in view of increasingly pressing practical needs due to technological development. This “normative approach” suggests abandoning theoretical discussions about what conditions may hold for moral agency and to what extent these may be met by artificial entities such as AI systems and robots. Instead, the debate should focus on how and to what extent such entities should be included in human practices normally assuming moral agency and (...) responsibility of participants. The proposal is backed up by an analysis of the AMA debate, which is found to be overly caught in the opposition between so-called standard and functionalist conceptions of moral agency, conceptually confused and practically inert. Additionally, we outline some main themes of research in need of attention in light of the suggested normative approach to AMA. (shrink)

Nuestro propósito en este artículo será mostrar cómo algunas nuevas tecnologías juegan un papel crucial en la cognición moral. Siguiendo la idea de moralidad distribuida de Magnani, ilustraremos las razones por las que las tecnologías cotidianas no son externas al contexto en el que operan, sino que por el contrario modifican nuestra capacidad de hacer frente a las situaciones que implican algún tipo de dilema moral. Sostendremos, por tanto, una visión alternativa de la agencia moral. De acuerdo con esta, los (...) artefactos no son simplemente agentes delegados, sino que redefinen los límites de la agencia moral humana que continuamente es moldeada por la interacción entre un individuo y su ambiente. (shrink)

This paper argues against the moral Turing test as a framework for evaluating the moral performance of autonomous systems. Though the term has been carefully introduced, considered, and cautioned about in previous discussions :251–261, 2000; Allen and Wallach 2009), it has lingered on as a touchstone for developing computational approaches to moral reasoning :98–109, 2015). While these efforts have not led to the detailed development of an MTT, they nonetheless retain the idea to discuss what kinds of action and reasoning (...) should be demanded of autonomous systems. We explore the flawed basis of an MTT in imitation, even one based on scenarios of morally accountable actions. MTT-based evaluations are vulnerable to deception, inadequate reasoning, and inferior moral performance vis a vis a system’s capabilities. We propose verification—which demands the design of transparent, accountable processes of reasoning that reliably prefigure the performance of autonomous systems—serves as a superior framework for both designer and system alike. As autonomous social robots in particular take on an increasing range of critical roles within society, we conclude that verification offers an essential, albeit challenging, moral measure of their design and performance. (shrink)

The ethics of emerging forms of artificial intelligence has become a prolific subject in both academic and public spheres. A great deal of these concerns flow from the need to ensure that these technologies do not cause harm—physical, emotional or otherwise—to the human agents with which they will interact. In the literature, this challenge has been met with the creation of artificial moral agents: embodied or virtual forms of artificial intelligence whose decision procedures are constrained by explicit normative principles, requiring (...) the implementation of what is commonly called artificial morality into these agents. To date, the types of reasoning structures and principles which inform artificial morality have been of two kinds: first, an ethically maximal vision of artificial morality which relies on the strict implementation of traditional moral theories such as Kantian deontology or Utilitarianism, and second, a more minimalist vision which applies stochastic AI techniques to large data sets of human moral preferences so as to illicit or intuit general principles and preferences for the design of artificial morality. Taken individually, each approach is unable to fully answer the challenge of producing inoffensive behavior in artificial moral agents, most especially since both forms are unable to strike a balance between the ideal set of constraints which morality imposes on one hand, and the types of constraints public acceptability imposes, on the other. We provide an alternative approach to the design of artificial morality, the Ethical Valence Theory, whose purpose is to accommodate this balance, and apply this approach to the case of autonomous vehicles. (shrink)

The overall aim of this thesis is to look at some philosophical issues surrounding autonomous systems in society and war. These issues can be divided into three main categories. The first, discussed in papers I and II, concerns ethical issues surrounding the use of autonomous systems – where the focus in this thesis is on military robots. The second issue, discussed in paper III, concerns how to make sure that advanced robots behave ethically adequate. The third issue, discussed in papers (...) IV and V, has to do with agency and responsibility. Another issue, somewhat aside from the philosophical, has to do with coping with future technologies, and developing methods for dealing with potentially disruptive technologies. This is discussed in papers VI and VII. Paper I systemizes some ethical issues surrounding the use of UAVs in war, with the laws of war as a backdrop. It is suggested that the laws of war are too wide and might be interpreted differently depending on which normative moral theory is used. Paper II is about future, more advanced autonomous robots, and whether the use of such robots can undermine the justification for killing in war. The suggestion is that this justification is substantially undermined if robots are used to replace humans to a high extent. Papers I and II both suggest revisions or additions to the laws or war. Paper III provides a discussion on one normative moral theory – ethics of care – connected to care robots. The aim is twofold: first, to provide a plausible and ethically relevant interpretation of the key term care in ethics of care, and second, to discuss whether ethics of care may be a suitable theory to implement in care robots. Paper IV discusses robots connected to agency and responsibility, with a focus on consciousness. The paper has a functionalistic approach, and it is suggested that robots should be considered agents if they can behave as if they are, in a moral Turing test. Paper V is also about robots and agency, but with a focus on free will. The main question is whether robots can have free will in the same sense as we consider humans to have free will when holding them responsible for their actions in a court of law. It is argued that autonomy with respect to norms is crucial for the agency of robots. Paper VI investigates the assessment of socially disruptive technological change. The coevolution of society and potentially disruptive technolgies makes decision-guidance on such technologies difficult. Four basic principles are proposed for such decision guidance, involving interdisciplinary and participatory elements. Paper VII applies the results from paper VI – and a workshop – to autonomous systems, a potentially disruptive technology. A method for dealing with potentially disruptive technolgies is developed in the paper. (shrink)

Philosophers of information, according to Luciano Floridi (The philosophy of information. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, p 32), study how information should be “adequately created, processed, managed, and used.” A small number of epistemologists have employed the concept of information as a cornerstone of their theoretical framework. How this concept can be used to make sense of seemingly intractable epistemological problems, however, has not been widely explored. This paper examines Fred Dretske’s information-based epistemology, in particular his response to radical epistemological (...) skepticism. We discuss the relationship between information, evidence and knowledge in relation to the problem of skepticism and the options available to an information-based epistemology for dealing with it. (shrink)

Machine ethics is a field of applied ethics that has grown rapidly in the last decade. Increasingly advanced autonomous robots have expanded the focus of machine ethics from issues regarding the ethical development and use of technology by humans to a focus on ethical dimensions of the machines themselves. This thesis contains two essays, both about robots in some sense, representing these different perspectives of machine ethics. The first essay, “Is it Morally Right to use UAVs in War?” concerns an (...) example of robots today, namely the unmanned aerial vehicles used in war, and the ethics surrounding the use of such robots. In this essay it is argued that UAVs might affect how the laws of war are interpreted, and that there might be need for additional rules surrounding the use of UAVs. This represents the more traditional approach of machine ethics, focusing on the decisions of humans regarding the use of such robots. The second essay, “The Functional Morality of Robots”, concerns the robots of the future – the potential moral agency of robots. The suggestion in this essay is that robots should be considered moral agents if they can pass a moral version of the Turing Test. This represents the new focus of machine ethics: machine morality, or more precisely, machine agency. (shrink)