Building Moral Robots: Ethical Pitfalls and Challenges

This paper examines the ethical pitfalls and challenges that non-ethicists, such as researchers and programmers in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics, face when building moral machines. Whether ethics is “computable” depends on how programmers understand ethics in t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science and engineering ethics 2020-02, Vol.26 (1), p.141-157
Main Author: Gordon, John-Stewart
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adequacy
Artificial intelligence
Artificial Intelligence - ethics
Bioethics
Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering
Decision Making - ethics
Dissent and Disputes
Education
Engineering
Ethical standards
Ethical Theory
Ethicists
Ethics
Familiarity
Medicine/Public Health
Morals
Original Research/Scholarship
Philosophy
Philosophy of Science
Professional ethics
Programmers
Research Personnel - ethics
Researchers
Robotics
Robotics - ethics
Robots
Software - ethics
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Summary:This paper examines the ethical pitfalls and challenges that non-ethicists, such as researchers and programmers in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics, face when building moral machines. Whether ethics is “computable” depends on how programmers understand ethics in the first place and on the adequacy of their understanding of the ethical problems and methodological challenges in these fields. Researchers and programmers face at least two types of problems due to their general lack of ethical knowledge or expertise. The first type is so-called rookie mistakes, which could be addressed by providing these people with the necessary ethical knowledge. The second, more difficult methodological issue concerns areas of peer disagreement in ethics, where no easy solutions are currently available. This paper examines several existing approaches to highlight the ethical pitfalls and challenges involved. Familiarity with these and similar problems can help programmers to avoid pitfalls and build better moral machines. The paper concludes that ethical decisions regarding moral robots should be based on avoiding what is immoral (i.e. prohibiting certain immoral actions) in combination with a pluralistic ethical method of solving moral problems, rather than relying on a particular ethical approach, so as to avoid a normative bias.
ISSN:1353-3452
1471-5546
DOI:10.1007/s11948-019-00084-5