Machine Ethics

This volume of collected essays explores developing ethics for machines, in contrast to developing ethics for human beings who use machines.

Michael Anderson (Edited by), Susan Leigh Anderson (Edited by)

9781108461757, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 29 March 2018

546 pages, 50 b/w illus.
23 x 15.6 x 3 cm, 0.86 kg

'… a thought-provoking introduction to the field of machine ethics, and I recommend it to students and researchers outside of the field who are looking to broaden their interests.' Cory Siler, Artificial Intelligence

The new field of machine ethics is concerned with giving machines ethical principles, or a procedure for discovering a way to resolve the ethical dilemmas they might encounter, enabling them to function in an ethically responsible manner through their own ethical decision making. Developing ethics for machines, in contrast to developing ethics for human beings who use machines, is by its nature an interdisciplinary endeavor. The essays in this volume represent the first steps by philosophers and artificial intelligence researchers toward explaining why it is necessary to add an ethical dimension to machines that function autonomously, what is required in order to add this dimension, philosophical and practical challenges to the machine ethics project, various approaches that could be considered in attempting to add an ethical dimension to machines, work that has been done to date in implementing these approaches, and visions of the future of machine ethics research.

Part I. The Nature of Machine Ethics: 1. The nature, importance, and difficulty of machine ethics James Moor
2. Machine metaethics Susan Leigh Anderson
3. Ethics for machines J. Storrs Hall
Part II. The Importance of Machine Ethics: 4. Why machine ethics? Colin Allen, Wendell Wallach and Iva Smit
5. Authenticity in the age of digital companions Sherry Turkel
Part III. Issues Concerning Machine Ethics: 6. What matters to a machine? Drew McDermott
7. Machine ethics and the idea of a more-than-human moral world Steve Torrance
8. On computable morality: an examination of machines as moral advisors Blay Whitby
9. When is a robot a moral agent? John Sullins
10. Philosophical concerns with machine ethics Susan Leigh Anderson
11. Computer systems: moral ethics but not moral agents Deborah G. Johnson
12. On the morality of artificial agents Luciano Floridi
13. Legal rights for machines: some fundamental concepts David J. Calverley
Part IV. Approaches to Machine Ethics: 14. Towards the ethical robot James Gips
15. Asimov's laws of robotics: implications for information technology Roger Clarke
16. The unacceptability of Asimov's 'three laws of robotics' as a basis for machine ethics Susan Leigh Anderson
17. Computational models of ethical reasoning: challenges, initial steps, and future directions Bruce McLaren
18. Computational neural modeling and the philosophy of ethics: reflections on the particularism-generalism debate Marcello Guarini
19. Architectures and ethics for robots: constraint satisfaction as a unitary design framework Alan K. Mackworth
20. Piagetian roboethics via category theory: moving beyond mere formal operations to engineer robots whose decisions are guaranteed to be ethically correct Selmer Bringsjord, Joshua Taylor, Bram van Heuveln, Konstantine Arkoudas, Micah Clark and Ralph Wojtowicz
21. Ethical protocols design Matteo Turilli
22. Modelling morality with prospective logic Luis Moniz Pereira and Ari Saptawijaya
23. An integrated reasoning approach to moral decision-making Morteza Dehghani, Ken Forbus, Emmett Tomai and Matthew Klenk
24. Prototyping n-reasons: a computer mediated ethics machine Peter Danielson
25. There is no 'I' in 'robot': robots and utilitarianism Christopher Grau
26. Prospects for a Kantian machine Thomas M. Powers
27. A prima facie duty approach to machine ethics: machine learning of features of ethical dilemmas, prima facie duties and decision principles, through a dialogue with ethicists Susan Leigh Anderson and Michael Anderson
Part V. Visions for Machine Ethics: 28. What can AI do for ethics? Helen Seville and Debora G. Field
29. Ethics for self-improving machines J. Storrs Hall
30. How machines might help us to achieve breakthroughs in ethical theory and inspire us to behave better Susan Leigh Anderson
31. Homo sapiens 2.0: building the better robots of our nature Eric Dietrich.

Subject Areas: Human-computer interaction [UYZ], Artificial intelligence [UYQ], Ethical & social aspects of IT [UBJ]