Expanding Nallur's Landscape of Machine Implemented Ethics
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Expanding Nallur’s Landscape of Machine Implemented Ethics William A. Bauer1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Introduction What ethical principles should autonomous machines follow? How do we implement these principles, and how do we evaluate these implementations? These are some of the critical questions Vivek Nallur asks in his essay “Landscape of Machine Implemented Ethics.” He provides a broad, insightful survey of answers to these questions, especially focused on the implementation question. In this commentary, I will first critically summarize the main themes and conclusions of Nallur’s essay and then expand upon the landscape that Nallur presents by suggesting additional approaches to machine ethics. The approaches I discuss reflect normative ethical theories and need not be applied only to machines, although machine ethics is the focus here. The overall goal is to open up further questions and research possibilities as society searches for the best approach to machine ethics.
Critical Summary of the Landscape As Nallur conceives them, autonomous machines have the decision-making power to achieve goals by acting in the world. They are artificial agents. Because these machines impact humans, he reasonably asserts that they “need to be imbued with a sense of ethics that reflect the social milieu they operate in and make decisions that are ethically acceptable to society.” The emphasis on society and the social milieu indicates Nallur’s rather descriptivist approach to machine ethics; the idea is to understand what we actually want or what values are actually represented in society, then implement those in machines. We need machine ethics, he observes, because humans cannot be there to supervise or make every decision that machines need to make, and in fact, could slow processes down considerably when time is of the essence (e.g., in emergency situations). * William A. Bauer [email protected]; [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA
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First, we should clarify the nature and scope of the questions Nallur raises. This provides an opportunity to reveal two broad types of questions asked in the field of machine ethics and the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), which will help clarify Nallur’s project. There are two types of questions within machine ethics. The first concerns smallscale interactions. Where there are relatively small groups of interacting agents (at least two), which might involve human agents, we want to specify which norms artificial moral agents should follow in their interactions.1 These questions about smallscale interactions seem to be Nallur’s primary focus, but beyond these, there are ethical questions about the large-scale, sociotechnical systems in which machines operate. These are large-scale issues concerning the democratic governance of sociotechnical systems. For example, there are investigations about how to put “societyin-the-loop” (Rawhan 2017) (modeled on the idea
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