Why Machine Ethics?

Abstract

A runaway trolley is approaching a fork in the tracks. If the trolley runs on its current track, it will kill a work crew of five. If the driver steers the train down the other branch, the trolley will kill a lone worker. If you were driving the trolley, what would you do? What would a computer or robot do? Trolley cases, first introduced by philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967 1 and a staple of introductory ethics courses, have multiplied in the past four decades. What if it's a bystander, rather than the driver, who has the power to switch the trolley's course? What if preventing the five deaths requires pushing another spectator off a bridge onto the tracks? These variants evoke different intuitive responses.Given the advent of modern "driverless" train systems, which are now common at airports and beginning to appear in more complicated situations such as the London Underground and the Paris and Copenhagen Metro systems, could trolley cases be one of the first frontiers for machine ethics? Machine ethics (also known as machine morality, artificial morality, or computational ethics) is an emerging field that seeks to implement moral decision-making faculties in computers and robots. Is it too soon to be broaching this topic? We don't think so.Driverless systems put machines in the position of making split-second decisions that could have life or death implications. As a rail network's complexity increases, the likelihood of dilemmas not unlike the basic trolley case also increases. How, for example, do we want our automated systems to compute where to steer an out-of-control train? Suppose our driverless train knew that there were five railroad workers on one track and a child on the other. Would we want the system to factor this information into its decision?The driverless trains of today are, of course, ethically oblivious. Can and should software engineers attempt to enhance their software systems to explicitly represent ethical dimensions of situations in which decisions must be made? It's easy to argue from a position of ignorance that such a goal is impossible to achieve. But precisely what are the challenges and obstacles for implementing machine ethics? The computer revolution is continuing to promote reliance on automation, and autonomous systems are coming whether we like it or not. Will they be ethical? Good and bad artificial agents?This isn't about the horrors of technology. Yes, the machines are coming. Yes, their existence will have unintended effects on our lives, not all of them good. But no, we don't believe that increasing reliance on autonomous systems will undermine our basic humanity. Neither will advanced robots enslave or exterminate us, in the best traditions of science fiction. We humans have always adapted to our technological products, and the benefits of having autonomous machines will most likely outweigh the costs.But optimism doesn't come for free. We can't just sit back and hope things will turn out for the best. We already have semiautonomous robots and software agents that viola...

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