Curious Christian

Reflections on culture, nature, and spirituality from a Christian perspective

Manufacturing Morality: Can Ethics Be Engineered Into AI?

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Matt Stone

2010-07-05

This evening I came across a provocative but thought provoking comment by Robotics ethicist Wendell Wallach which suggests that AI research has the potential to scientize ethics, by making ethics subject to experimental verification:

Successfully building a moral machine, however we might do so, is no proof of how human beings behave ethically. At best, a working machine could stand as an existence proof of one way humans could go about things. But in a very real and salient sense, research in machine morality provides a test bed for theories and assumptions that human beings (including ethicists) often make about moral behavior. If these cannot be translated into specifications and implemented over time in a working machine, then we have strong reason to believe that they are false or, in more pragmatic terms, unworkable. In other words, robot ethics forces us to consider human moral behavior on the basis of what is actually implementable in practice. It is a perspective that has been absent from moral philosophy since its inception.

But is this valid? What counts as a ‘workable’ ethic? Is it possible to test for a ‘workable’ ethic without predetermining your answer before you ask the question?

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6 responses to “Manufacturing Morality: Can Ethics Be Engineered Into AI?”

Kalessin

2010-07-05

Why robots, though? Surely only the computer parts of the robots are relevant, so why not just use computers?
If you *must*, you could program them to think that they’re robots. Unless that would be, errr, unethical.

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Lucy J

2010-07-06

Yeah, and exactly WHO should program such things? A computer programmer with a “mouse potato” lifestyle? It appears to me that all the “experimentation” throughout the history of humanity has not resulted in much improvement in the way people treat each other. If we are spiritual beings having a human experience, there is something wrong with the spiritual “programming”. If we are human beings having a spiritual experience, there is obviously something wrong with humanity. Despite science having achieved truly amazing things, it’s interesting that it hasn’t been able to provide solutions for human relationships. I’m not sure robotics principles based on rationality/logic will make much difference either, since there are parts of our being that are irrational/psychological…

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Kalessin

2010-07-06

> Yeah, and exactly WHO should program such things?
> A computer programmer with a “mouse potato” lifestyle?
I’ve interviewed 50+ applicants for programming roles in the past year, and though most were young and fit, their lifestyle really made no difference to their skills. Or their ethics.
But yes, get a programmer if you want to program something.

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Steve Hayes

2010-07-07

At one timme, in the days before windows, I played around with Rurbo Prolog, a language that could, at least in theory, be used to write a program to answer ethical questions. But a lot would depend on the system of ethics that was programmed into it.

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Lucy J

2010-07-07

Thanks, Steve, that’s my point… what system of ethics (is there such a thing as a universal system of ethics?) would be used in robotics/ethics experiements and who gets to decide whose system to use?
Kalessin… I’m glad to hear you are coming into contact with physically fit and vocationally adept programmers. It gives me hope, because many of the ones I randomly meet, don’t fit that description. However, now you have made me curious as to what criteria you used to ascertain your interviewees’ ethical position since you felt this was not affected by their physical fitness or jobskills?
What I am driving at is that I am beginning to think that maturity and wisdom would be important factors in the lives of robotics programmers as well as their skillset and understanding of robotics, if they were going to be experimenting with things that could affect the whole of humanity.
Let’s face it, humans have historically demonstrated limited ability in this area, and currently, a growing realisation of this is accompanied by a surge of interest in spirituality and ethics.

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Kalessin

2010-07-08

Lucy wrote:
> However, now you have made me curious as to what criteria
> you used to ascertain your interviewees’ ethical position
> since you felt this was not affected by their physical
> fitness or jobskills?
No process; but in my personal experience over a decade or two, the dodgiest have all been thin and usually sporty. Must be the cocaine. 🙂 Your mileage may vary.

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