This paper takes stock of all the various factors that cause the design-time opacity of autonomous systems behaviour. The factors include embodiment effects, design-time knowledge gap, human factors, emergent behaviour and tacit knowledge. This situation is contrasted with the usual representation of moral dilemmas that assume perfect information. Since perfect information is not achievable, the traditional moral dilemma representations are not valid and the whole problem of ethical autonomous systems design proves to be way more empirical than previously understood.

The title of Tihamér Margitay’s recent article “From Epistemology to Ontology” refers to a strong interpretation of Polanyi’s correspondence between knowing and being that enables ontological claims on purely epistemic grounds. I accept Margitay’s final conclusion which rejects strong correspondence, although on entirely different grounds. In addition, I point out that his treatment of Polanyi’s ontological claims about machines is based on yet unfounded assumptions about the nature of physics and technical design.

The possibility of interacting with remote services in natural language opens up new opportunities for sharing knowledge and for automating services. Easy-to-use, text-based interfaces might provide more democratic access to legal information, government services, and everyday knowledge as well. However, the methodology of engineering robust natural language interfaces is very diverse, and widely deployed solutions are still yet to come. The main contribution is a detailed problem analysis on the theoretical level, which reveals that a text-based interface is best understood (...) as an artificial agent that represents the interests of the remote party who is separated in time and space from the client. A possible ethical issue about the development of such an agent is also discussed. (shrink)