Abstract
The authors argue that unless computational deontic logics (or, for that matter, any other class of systems for mechanizing moral and/or legal principles) or achieving ethical control of future AIs and robots are woven into the operating-system level of such artifacts, such control will be at best dangerously brittle.
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Notes
- 1.
The authors of this chapter are deeply grateful to OFAI for the opportunity to discuss robot ethics in a lively and wonderfully productive workshop in Vienna, and to both ONR and AFOSR for support that enables the rigorous pursuit of robot moral reasoning.
- 2.
In keeping with [5].
- 3.
Not much unlike the current-day ROS.
- 4.
Alternatively, given that meth is still illegal, COLT could decide to concoct an equally addictive but new drug not covered by standing law.
- 5.
For example, techniques for replacing specification and operation of Turing machine with suitably constructed first-order theories, and the Curry–Howard isomorphism.
- 6.
For example, versions of it allow the generation of Chisholm’s Paradox; see [4].
- 7.
This may not always be proper.
- 8.
The source code for this example can be downloaded from https://github.com/naveensundarg/EthicalSubstrate.
- 9.
Under joint development by the HRI Lab (Scheutz) at Tufts University, the RAIR Lab (Bringsjord & Govindarajulu) and Social Interaction Lab (Si) at RPI, with contributions on the psychology side from Bertram Malle of Brown University. In addition to these investigators, the project includes two consultants: John Mikhail of Georgetown University Law School and Joshua Knobe of Yale University. This research project is sponsored by a MURI grant from the Office of Naval Research in the States. We are here and herein describing the logic-based ethical engineering designed and carried out by Bringsjord and Govindarajulu of the RAIR Lab (though in the final section (Sect. 5.5) we point to the need to link deontic logic to emotions, with help from Si).
- 10.
Of course, the technical substance of our hierarchy approach would presumably provide elements useful in the approach advocated in the preset position paper.
- 11.
UIMA has found considerable success as the backbone of IBM’s famous Watson system [7], which in 2011, to much fanfare (at least in the USA), beat the best human players in the game of Jeopardy!.
- 12.
Though written rather long ago, [17] is still a wonderful introduction to the subfield in formal logic of conditional logic. In the final analysis, sophisticated moral reasoning can only be accurately modeled for formal logics that include conditionals much more expressive and nuanced than the material conditional. For example, even the well-known trolley-problem cases (in which, to save multiple lives, one can either redirect a train, killing one person in the process, or directly stop the train by throwing someone in front of it), which are not exactly complicated, require, when analyzed informally but systematically, as shown, e.g., by Mikhail [16], counterfactuals.
- 13.
We are here pointing to the labor-shortage problem. For an approach to the technical challenge of program verification based on proof-checking, in which, assuming that programs are recast as proof finders, program verification becomes straightforward (at least programmatically speaking), see [1]. In this approach, traditional program verification is needed only for the one small piece of code that implements proof-checking.
- 14.
Govindarajulu’s [10] dissertation marks a contribution to the so-called harder half of the crowdsourcing direction. Again, the “easier half,” which apparently is what DARPA has hitherto spent money to address, is to use games to allow nonexperts playing them to generate specifications corresponding to code. The harder half is devoted to proving that such specifications are indeed true with respect to the associated code. In Govindarajulu’s novel games, to play is to find proofs that specifications do in fact hold of programs. Interested readers have only to search the internet for ‘Catabot Rescue’.
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Govindarajulu, N.S., Bringsjord, S. (2015). Ethical Regulation of Robots Must Be Embedded in Their Operating Systems. In: Trappl, R. (eds) A Construction Manual for Robots' Ethical Systems. Cognitive Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21548-8_5
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