Machine Ethics

by Edited by Michael Anderson , Susan Leigh Anderson

• ISBN13: 9780521112352
• ISBN10: 0521112354
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-09
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Dr. Michael, Anderson is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Hartford, West Hartford, Connecticut. His interest in further enabling machine autonomy led him first to investigate how a computer might deal with diagrammatic information - work that was funded by the National Science Foundation - and has currently resulted in his establishing machine ethics as a bona fide field of scientific inquiry with Susan Leigh Anderson. He maintains the Machine Ethics Web site (http://www.machineethics.org). Dr. Susan Leigh Anderson is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Her specialty is applied ethics, most recently focusing on biomedical ethics and machine ethics. She has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and, with Michael Anderson, from NASA and the NSE She is the author of three books in the Wadsworth Philosophers Series, as well as numerous articles.

Table of Contents

General Introduction	p. 1
The Nature
Introduction	p. 7
The Nature, Importance, and Difficulty of Machine Ethics	p. 13
Machine Metaethics	p. 21
Ethics for Machines	p. 28
The Importance of Machine Ethics
Introduction	p. 47
Why Machine Ethics?	p. 51
Authenticity in the Age of Digital Companions	p. 62
Issues Concerning Machine Ethics
Introduction	p. 79
What Matters to a Machine?	p. 88
Machine Ethics and the Idea of a More-Than-Human Moral World	p. 115
On Computable Morality: An Examination of Machines as Moral Advisors	p. 138
When Is a Robot a Moral Agent?	p. 151
Philosophical Concerns with Machine Ethics	p. 162
Computer Systems: Moral Entities but Not Moral Agents	p. 168
On the Morality of Artificial Agents	p. 184
Legal Rights for Machines: Some Fundamental Concepts	p. 2213
Approaches to Machine Ethics
Introduction	p. 231
Overview
Towards the Ethical Robot	p. 244
Asimov's Laws
Asimov's Laws of Robotics: Implications for Information Technology	p. 254
The Unacceptability of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics as a Basis for Machine Ethics	p. 285
Artificial Intelligence Approaches
Computational Models of Ethical Reasoning: Challenges, Initial Steps, and Future Directions
Computational Neural Modeling and the Philosophy of Ethics: Reflections on the Particularism-Generalism Debate	p. 316
Architectures and Ethics for Robot: Constraint Satisfaction as a Unitary design Framework	p. 335
Piagetian Roboethics via Category Theory: Moving beyond Mere Formal Operations to Engineer Robots Whose Decisions Are Guaranteed to be Ethically Correct	p. 361
Ethical Protocols Design	p. 375
Modeling Morality with Prospective Logic	p. 398
An Integrated Reasoning Approach to Moral decision Making	p. 422
Prototyping N- Reason: A Computer Mediated Ethics Machine	p. 442
Philosophical Approaches
There Is No "I" in "Robot": Robots and Utilitarianism	p. 451
Prospects for a Kantian Machine	p. 464
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	p. 476
Visions for Machine Ethics
Introduction	p. 495
What Can AI Do for Ethics?	p. 499
Ethics for Self-Improving Machines	p. 512
How Machines Might Help Us Achieve Breakthroughs in Ethical Theory and Inspire Us to Behave Better	p. 524
Home Sapiens 2.0: Building the Better Robots of Our Nature	p. 531
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