num_pages: 275
description: Computers are already approving financial transactions controlling electrical supplies and driving trains. Soon service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach argue that as robots take on more and more responsibility they must be programmed with moral decision-making abilities for our own safety. Taking a fast paced tour through the latest thinking about philosophical ethics and artificial intelligence the authors argue that even if full moral agency for machines is a long way off it is already necessary to start building a kind of functional morality in which artificial moral agents have some basic ethical sensitivity. But the standard ethical theories don't seem adequate and more socially engaged and engaging robots will be needed. As the authors show the quest to build machines that are capable of telling right from wrong has begun.Moral Machines is the first book to examine the challenge of building artificial moral agents probing deeply into the nature of human decision making and ethics.ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction 31 . Why Machine Morality?2 . Engineering Morality3 . Does Humanity Want Computers Making Moral Decisions? 4 . Can (Ro)bots Really Be Moral?5 . Philosophers Engineers and the Design of AMAs 6 . Top-Down Morality 7 . Bottom-Up and Developmental Approaches8 . Merging Top-Down and Bottom-Up9 . Beyond Vaporware?10 . Beyond Reason11 . A More Human-Like AMA12 . Dangers Rights and ResponsibilitiesEpilogue(Ro)bot Minds and Human EthicsNotesBibliographyIndex
language: English
title: Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong
publisher: Oxford University Press