Author: Scotty Hendricks / Source: Big Think
We are rapidly approaching the day when an autonomous artificial intelligence may have to make ethical decisions of great magnitude without human supervision. The question that we must answer is how it should act when life is on the line.
Helping us make our decision is philosopher James H. Moor, one of the first philosophers to make significant inroads into computer ethics.
In his 2009 essay Four Kinds of Ethical Robots, he examines the possible ethical responsibilities machines could have and how we ought to think about it.
Dr. Moor breaks categorizes machines of all kinds into four ethical groups. Each group has different ethical abilities that we need to account for when designing and responding to them.
Ethical impact agents are devices like watches which could have a positive or negative impact on humans. While a watch is unable to do anything but tell me what time it is, the timepiece could be wrong and therefore cause me to be late.
Implicit ethical agents are machines like ATMs that have certain ethical concerns addressed in their very design. ATMs, for example, have safeguards to assure they give out the proper amount of money and are just to both you and the bank.
Other machines can be implicitly vicious, such as a torture device which is designed to assure maximum pain and is failsafe against comfort. While these machines have distinct ethical features, they are part of the machine’s very being; and not the result of a decision process.
Explicit ethical agents are closer to what most of us think of when we think of programmable robots and artificial intelligence. These devices and machines can be “thought of as acting from ethics, not merely according to ethics.”
To use the example of an ATM again, while an ATM has to check your balance before you run off with all of the bank’s money, it doesn’t decide to do that because the programmer gave it an ethical code, it was explicitly told to check.
An explicit ethical agent would be an ATM which was told to always prevent theft and then decided to check your balance before giving you the one million dollars you asked it for so it might reach that end.
Full ethical agents are beings which function just like us, including free will and a sense of self. An entirely moral being, biological or not.
It is safe to say that no machine currently qualifies for this designation, and the bulk of academic and popular discussion focuses on explicit ethical agents. The idea of an entirely ethical device is a fascinating one, however, which is found in works such as
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