One of the objectives in the field of artificial intelligence for some decades has been the development of artificial agents capable of coexisting in harmony with people and other systems. The computing research community has made efforts to design a...
This paper discusses the problem of responsibility attribution raised by the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. It is assumed that only humans can be responsible agents; yet this alone already raises many issues, which are discussed st...
Since its first publication in 1818, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus has transcended genres and cultures to become a foundational myth about science and technology across a multitude of media forms and adaptations. Following in...
Automated technologies and robots make decisions that cannot always be fully controlled or predicted. In addition to that, they cannot respond to punishment and blame in the ways humans do. Therefore, when automated cars harm or kill people, for exam...
Can robots have significant moral status? This is an emerging topic of debate among roboticists and ethicists. This paper makes three contributions to this debate. First, it presents a theory-'ethical behaviourism'-which holds that robots can have si...
Artificial intelligence (AI) research and regulation seek to balance the benefits of innovation against any potential harms and disruption. However, one unintended consequence of the recent surge in AI research is the potential re-orientation of AI t...
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"...
Many industry leaders and academics from the field of machine ethics would have us believe that the inevitability of robots coming to have a larger role in our lives demands that robots be endowed with moral reasoning capabilities. Robots endowed in ...
Ethical thought experiments such as the trolley dilemma have been investigated extensively in the past, showing that humans act in utilitarian ways, trying to cause as little overall damage as possible. These trolley dilemmas have gained renewed atte...
The literature on self-driving cars and ethics continues to grow. Yet much of it focuses on ethical complexities emerging from an individual vehicle. That is an important but insufficient step towards determining how the technology will impact human ...