Communications of the ACM
Ethical, Autonomous Robots of the Near Future
Researchers are considering the ethics of artificial intelligence in the context of how robots will behave.
Credit: uzi-muzi
Researchers are giving serious consideration to the ethics of artificial intelligence as they consider a world with autonomous robots.
Subfields dealing with the behavior of artificial moral agents and the behavior of humans building and using robots have emerged.
One of the most fundamental issues, and one in which many questions remain unanswered, involves the concept of moral competence. In a research paper published earlier this year, Brown University professor Bertram F. Malle and Tufts University professor Matthias Scheutz argue moral competence consists of a moral core, as well as moral action, moral cognition and emotion, and moral communication. In the paper, they describe the moral core component as "a system of norms and the language and concepts to communicate about these norms," including moral concepts and language and a network of moral norms.
To design autonomous and morally competent robots, engineers will first need to construct computational representations of norm systems and embed moral concepts and vocabulary into the robotic architecture. Then they will have to develop algorithms that can computationally capture moral cognition and decision-making.
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