17 July 2014

Ethical & Autonomous Robots

The engineering of autonomous, morally competent robots might include a perfectly crafted conscience capable of distinguishing right from wrong and acting on it. In the near future, artificial intelligence entities might be better moral creatures than we are, or at least better decision makers when facing certain dilemmas. Since 2002, the ethics of artificial intelligence was divided into two subfields: machine ethics and roboethics.


Naturally, to be able to create such morally autonomous robots, researchers have to agree on some fundamental pillars: what moral competence is and what humans would expect from robots working side by side with them, sharing decision making in areas like healthcare and warfare. At the same time, another question arises: What is the human responsibility of creating artificial intelligence with moral autonomy? And the leading research question: What would we expect of morally competent robots?

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