Machine Ethics

At its core, a computer executes instructions, the code we build into it. Therefore, one can argue that computers do not have their own discretion beyond what humans incorporate into such systems. Intentional actions of any code are essentially limited only to the extent its writer chooses. In this mode, computers can be described as tools, or enablers, of what the users want to do. The entire accountability for ethical conduct rests with its creators. This is not to say that humans do not use these enablers in an immoral way. During the 1970s, the leadership of Equity Funding, a US life insurance company, decided to create fake records of life policies, reinsure them and obtain cash from reinsurers by declaring some of these fake insured entities as dead. They hid these data from their auditors in what they called “File 99. ” Manipulating the code or data to commit a criminal or immoral act is possible even when computers are no more than tools and the perpetrators come from the line of users or creators. But, an era of advanced computing in which computers are increasingly taking over far more sophisticated roles has arrived and continues to expand. Robotics and nanotechnology are just two examples of developing disciplines that will push the role of computers and computing well past the era of enablers. According to Ray Kurzweil, by the year 2045, “human intelligence will enhance a billion-fold thanks to high-tech brain extensions. ”1 He refers to this phenomenon as the “singularity,” a point at which humans and computers will merge. This sort of “one in two” will create serious challenges in the allocation of moral accountability between the two. To develop insights into ethical dilemmas of the new world of advanced technologies and their applications, a whole new field, called moral machines or machine ethics, is emerging. Broadly, machine ethics is a discipline that attempts to address the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). While AI has slowly been transitioning from fiction and movies (e.g., Transformers) to the real world over the past several decades, attempts to articulate its moral dimensions are relatively recent. Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong2 and Machine Ethics3 are two significant publications offering a discussion of morality in the context of smart machines. This leap from computer ethics to machine ethics is necessary due to the elevated status of computers from mere enablers to intelligent collaborators with humans. James Moor considers computing machines that are basically enablers of tasks as normative agents, but not necessarily ethical agents, because they merely perform the tasks as specified and their performance can be objectively assessed. Any development of machines beyond this state requires consideration of the ethical dimension that the embedded intelligence should reflect in its design. For this, Moor suggests three ways to classify issues of moral values in machines: ethical impact agents, implicit ethical agents and explicit ethical agents.4 Each category progressively assigns a greater moral role to machines. Here, we discuss machine ethics using Moor’s classification.