GenEth: a general ethical dilemma analyzer

Abstract

We argue that ethically significant behavior of autonomous systems should be guided by explicit ethical principles determined through a consensus of ethicists. Such a consensus is likely to emerge in many areas in which intelligent autonomous systems are apt to be deployed and for the actions they are liable to undertake, as we are more likely to agree on how machines ought to treat us than on how human beings ought to treat one another. Given such a consensus, particular cases of ethical dilemmas where ethicists agree on the ethically relevant features and the right course of action can be used to help discover principles needed for ethical guidance of the behavior of autonomous systems. Such principles help ensure the ethical behavior of complex and dynamic systems and further serve as a basis for justification of this behavior. To provide assistance in discovering ethical principles, we have developed GenEth, a general ethical dilemma analyzer that, through a dialog with ethicists, uses inductive logic programming to codify ethical principles in any given domain. GenEth has been used to codify principles in a number of domains pertinent to the behavior of autonomous systems and these principles have been verified using an Ethical Turing Test, a test devised to compare the judgments of codified principles with that of ethicists.

From What to How: An Initial Review of Publicly Available AI Ethics Tools, Methods and Research to Translate Principles into Practices

“…As the call for 'AI governance' has got louder, the number of available 12 ). The hope is that these principles, as abstractions (Anderson & Anderson, 2018), can act as normative constraints (Turilli, 2007) on the 'do's' and 'don'ts' of algorithmic use in society. This is a worthwhile aim, and a necessary building block in the creation of an environment that fosters ethical, responsible, and beneficial AI.…”

Machine Ethics: The Design and Governance of Ethical AI and Autonomous Systems [Scanning the Issue]

“…The earliest proposal for a practical ethical governor for robots -a mechanism for moderating or inhibiting a robot's behavior to prevent it from acting unethically -was from Arkin [20], 1 although not tested on real robots. At the time of writing the number of experimental demonstrations of ethical robots remains very small indeed; to the best of our knowledge there have been only five such demonstrations to date: (i) the GenEth system of Anderson and Anderson [22], (ii) the Asimovian ethical robots of Winfield et al [23] and Vanderelst and Winfield [24], (iii) Bringsjord et al's Akratic robot [25], (iv) the "sorry I can't do that" robot of Briggs and Scheutz [26], and (v) the Intervening robot mediator in healthcare of Shim, Arkin and Pettinatti [27]. Papers which review and update the approaches of (i) and (ii) are included in this issue; we now briefly review (iii -v).…”

“…Anderson and Anderson [22] propose an alternative "Ethical Turing Test" (ETT) in which a panel of ethicists are presented with the machine's ethical decisions across a range of application domains. Each ethicist is asked whether they agree or disagree with those decisions -if a significant number are in agreement (i.e., the ethicist would have made the same choice in the same situation)then the machine is judged to pass the test.…”

Building Ethics into Artificial Intelligence

“…Interactions [Anderson and Anderson, 2014] [ Dehghani et al, 2008] [Singh, 2014;Singh, 2015] [Battaglino and Damiano, 2015] [Bonnefon et al, 2016] [Blass and Forbus, 2015] [Pagallo, 2016] [Stock et al, 2016 [Sharif et al, 2017] [van Riemsdijk et al, 2015] [ Greene et al, 2016] [Luckin, 2017] [Cointe et al, 2016] [ Noothigattu et al, 2018] [ Yu et al, 2017b] [Conitzer et al, 2017] [Berreby et al, 2017] [Loreggia et al, 2018 [ Wu and Lin, 2018] abling the AI research community to understand human preferences on various ethical dilemmas; 2. Individual Ethical Decision Frameworks: generalizable decision-making mechanisms enabling individual agents to judge the ethics of its own actions and the actions of other agents under given contexts; 3.…”

“…In [Anderson and Anderson, 2014], the authors proposed the GenEth ethical dilemma analyzer. They realized that ethical issues related to intelligent systems are likely to exceed the grasp of the original system designers, and designed GenEth to include ethicists into the discussion process in order to codify ethical principles in given application domains.…”