The Nature, Importance, and Difficulty of Machine Ethics

TLDR

Machine ethics ranges from hospital database record keeping to disaster‑response coordination and can be conceptualized as ethical‑impact, implicit, explicit, or full agents; achieving explicit ethical agents is difficult without deeper understanding of ethics, machine learning, and cognition. The study aims to develop machines that function as explicit ethical agents. This article is part of a special issue on Machine Ethics.

Abstract

Machine ethics has a broad range of possible implementations in computer technology--from maintaining detailed records in hospital databases to overseeing emergency team movements after a disaster. From a machine ethics perspective, you can look at machines as ethical-impact agents, implicit ethical agents, explicit ethical agents, or full ethical agents. A current research challenge is to develop machines that are explicit ethical agents. This research is important, but accomplishing this goal will be extremely difficult without a better understanding of ethics and of machine learning and cognition. This article is part of a special issue on Machine Ethics.