Machine Ethics

by Michael Anderson (Editor), Susan Leigh Anderson (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521112352
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/09/2011
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	548
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Michael Anderson is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of 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. This interest 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 website (www.machineethics.org).

Susan Leigh Anderson is Professor Emeritus 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 NSF. She is the author of three books in the Wadsworth Philosophers Series, as well as numerous articles.

Table of Contents

Part I. The Nature of Machine Ethics: 1. The nature, importance, and difficulty of machine ethics James Moor; 2. Machine metaethics Susan Leigh Anderson; 3. Ethics for machines J. Storrs Hall; Part II. The Importance of Machine Ethics: 4. Why machine ethics? Colin Allen, Wendell Wallach and Iva Smit; 5. Authenticity in the age of digital companions Sherry Turkel; Part III. Issues Concerning Machine Ethics: 6. What matters to a machine? Drew McDermott; 7. Machine ethics and the idea of a more-than-human moral world Steve Torrance; 8. On computable morality: an examination of machines as moral advisors Blay Whitby; 9. When is a robot a moral agent? John Sullins; 10. Philosophical concerns with machine ethics Susan Leigh Anderson; 11. Computer systems: moral ethics but not moral agents Deborah G. Johnson; 12. On the morality of artificial agents Luciano Floridi; 13. Legal rights for machines: some fundamental concepts David J. Calverley; Part IV. Approaches to Machine Ethics: 14. Towards the ethical robot James Gips; 15. Asimov's laws of robotics: implications for information technology Roger Clarke; 16. The unacceptability of Asimov's 'three laws of robotics' as a basis for machine ethics Susan Leigh Anderson; 17. Computational models of ethical reasoning: challenges, initial steps, and future directions Bruce McLaren; 18. Computational neural modeling and the philosophy of ethics: reflections on the particularism-generalism debate Marcello Guarini; 19. Architectures and ethics for robots: constraint satisfaction as a unitary design framework Alan K. Mackworth; 20. Piagetian roboethics via category theory: moving beyond mere formal operations to engineer robots whose decisions are guaranteed to be ethically correct Selmer Bringsjord, Joshua Taylor, Bram van Heuveln, Konstantine Arkoudas, Micah Clark and Ralph Wojtowicz; 21. Ethical protocols design Matteo Turilli; 22. Modelling morality with prospective logic Luis Moniz Pereira and Ari Saptawijaya; 23. An integrated reasoning approach to moral decision-making Morteza Dehghani, Ken Forbus, Emmett Tomai and Matthew Klenk; 24. Prototyping n-reasons: a computer mediated ethics machine Peter Danielson; 25. There is no 'I' in 'robot': robots and utilitarianism Christopher Grau; 26. Prospects for a Kantian machine Thomas M. Powers; 27. 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 Susan Leigh Anderson and Michael Anderson; Part V. Visions for Machine Ethics: 28. What can AI do for ethics? Helen Seville and Debora G. Field; 29. Ethics for self-improving machines J. Storrs Hall; 30. How machines might help us to achieve breakthroughs in ethical theory and inspire us to behave better Susan Leigh Anderson; 31. Homo sapiens 2.0: building the better robots of our nature Eric Dietrich.

Editorial Reviews

"The variety of different opinions, combined with the intellectual honesty of the editors - going so far as to admit that critics might find one of their included papers to be naïve - makes for a refreshing experience. The book is suitable for beginners in the field of machine ethics, providing an introduction to this exciting new field of research."
Riemer Brouwer, Computing Reviews

"This anthology comprises a well-chosen collection of papers that are individually interesting and well worth reading on their own. Several essays stand out as exceptional contributions."
George Lazaroiu, Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice

"... a thought-provoking introduction to the field of machine ethics, and I recommend it to students and researchers outside of the field who are looking to broaden their interests."
Cory Siler, Artificial Intelligence

From the Publisher