Autonomous systems are being developed and deployed in situations that may require some degree of ethical decision-making ability. As a result, research in machine ethics has proliferated in recent years. This work has included using moral dilemmas as validation mechanisms for implementing decision-making algorithms in ethically-loaded situations. Using trolley-style problems in the context of autonomous vehicles as a case study, I argue (1) that this is a misapplication of philosophical thought experiments because (2) it fails to appreciate the purpose of moral dilemmas, and (3) this has potentially catastrophic consequences; however, (4) there are uses of moral dilemmas in machine ethics that are appropriate and the novel situations that arise in a machine-learning context can shed some light on philosophical work in ethics.
Tufts University（塔夫茨大学）；Colorado School of Mines（科罗拉多矿业学院）
In this paper we describe moral quasi-dilemmas (MQDs): situations similar to moral dilemmas, but in which an agent is unsure whether exploring the plan space or the world may reveal a course of action that satisfies all moral requirements. We argue that artificial moral agents (AMAs) should be built to handle MQDs (in particular, by exploring the plan space rather than immediately accepting the inevitability of the moral dilemma), and that MQDs may be useful for evaluating AMA architectures.
When Ethics and Payoffs Diverge: LLM Agents in Morally Charged Social Dilemmas
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen（图宾根人工智能研究所）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
Ethical thought experiments such as the trolley dilemma have been investigated extensively in the past, showing that humans act in a utilitarian way, trying to cause as little overall damage as possible. These trolley dilemmas have gained renewed attention over the past years; especially due to the necessity of implementing moral decisions in autonomous driving vehicles. We conducted a set of experiments in which participants experienced modified trolley dilemmas as the driver in a virtual reality environment. Participants had to make decisionsbetween two discrete options: driving on one of tw…
The Staircase of Ethics: Probing LLM Value Priorities through Multi-Step Induction to Complex Moral Dilemmas
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Media Synthesis and Forensics Lab（媒体合成与取证实验室）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）
We present what we call the Interpretation Problem, whereby any rule in symbolic form is open to infinite interpretation in ways that we might disapprove of and argue that any attempt to build morality into machines is subject to it. We show how the Interpretation Problem in Artificial Intelligence is an illustration of Wittgenstein's general claim that no rule can contain the criteria for its own application, and that the risks created by this problem escalate in proportion to the degree to which to machine is causally connected to the world, in what we call the Law of Interpretative Exposure…
Computer Science Department, University of Cape Town（开普敦大学计算机科学系）；University of Cape Town（开普敦大学）
Artificial Moral Agents (AMA's) is a field in computer science with the purpose of creating autonomous machines that can make moral decisions akin to how humans do. Researchers have proposed theoretical means of creating such machines, while philosophers have made arguments as to how these machines ought to behave, or whether they should even exist. Of the currently theorised AMA's, all research and design has been done with either none or at most one specified normative ethical theory as basis. This is problematic because it narrows down the AMA's functional ability and versatility which in t…
Large-scale behavioral datasets enable researchers to use complex machine learning algorithms to better predict human behavior, yet this increased predictive power does not always lead to a better understanding of the behavior in question. In this paper, we outline a data-driven, iterative procedure that allows cognitive scientists to use machine learning to generate models that are both interpretable and accurate. We demonstrate this method in the domain of moral decision-making, where standard experimental approaches often identify relevant principles that influence human judgments, but fail…
Informed AI Regulation: Comparing the Ethical Frameworks of Leading LLM Chatbots Using an Ethics-Based Audit to Assess Moral Reasoning and Normative Values
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) should reduce traffic accidents, but they will sometimes have to choose between two evils-for example, running over pedestrians or sacrificing itself and its passenger to save them. Defining the algorithms that will help AVs make these moral decisions is a formidable challenge. We found that participants to six MTurk studies approved of utilitarian AVs (that sacrifice their passengers for the greater good), and would like others to buy them, but they would themselves prefer to ride in AVs that protect their passengers at all costs. They would disapprove of enforcing u…
Charles Sturt University（查尔斯特大学）；University in Hartford（哈特福德大学）；University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）；Ohio Northern University（俄亥俄北方大学）
The field of machine ethics is concerned with the question of how to embed ethical behaviors, or a means to determine ethical behaviors, into artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The goal is to produce artificial moral agents (AMAs) that are either implicitly ethical (designed to avoid unethical consequences) or explicitly ethical (designed to behave ethically). Van Wynsberghe and Robbins' (2018) paper Critiquing the Reasons for Making Artificial Moral Agents critically addresses the reasons offered by machine ethicists for pursuing AMA research; this paper, co-authored by machine ethicists a…
Lethal Autonomous Weapons promise to revolutionize warfare -- and raise a multitude of ethical and legal questions. It has thus been suggested to program values and principles of conduct (such as the Geneva Conventions) into the machines' control, thereby rendering them both physically and morally superior to human combatants. We employ mathematical logic and theoretical computer science to explore fundamental limitations to the moral behaviour of intelligent machines in a series of "Gedankenexperiments": Refining and sharpening variants of the Trolley Problem leads us to construct an (admitte…
Artificial intelligence (AI) was initially developed as an implicit moral agent to solve simple and clearly defined tasks where all options are predictable. However, it is now part of our daily life powering cell phones, cameras, watches, thermostats, vacuums, cars, and much more. This has raised numerous concerns and some scholars and practitioners stress the dangers of AI and argue against its development as moral agents that can reason about ethics (e.g., Bryson 2008; Johnson and Miller 2008; Sharkey 2017; Tonkens 2009; van Wynsberghe and Robbins 2019). Even though we acknowledge the potent…
Fairness-aware machine learning (fair-ml) techniques are algorithmic interventions designed to ensure that individuals who are affected by the predictions of a machine learning model are treated fairly. The problem is often posed as an optimization problem, where the objective is to achieve high predictive performance under a quantitative fairness constraint. However, any attempt to design a fair-ml algorithm must assume a world where Goodhart's law has an exception: when a fairness measure becomes an optimization constraint, it does not cease to be a good measure. In this paper, we argue that…
Large-scale moral machine experiment on large language models
Department of Bioscience and Bioinformatics, Kyushu Institute of Technology（九州工科大学生物科学与生物信息学系）；Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Multimedia University（多媒体大学工程与技术学院）；Data Science and AI Research Center, Kyushu Institute of Technology（九州工科大学数据科学与人工智能研究中心）
The ethics of Machine Learning has become an unavoidable topic in the AI Community. The deployment of machine learning systems in multiple social contexts has resulted in a closer ethical scrutiny of the design, development, and application of these systems. The AI/ML community has come to terms with the imperative to think about the ethical implications of machine learning, not only as a product but also as a practice (Birhane, 2021; Shen et al. 2021). The critical question that is troubling many debates is what can constitute an ethically accountable machine learning system. In this paper we…
Culturally-Attuned Moral Machines: Implicit Learning of Human Value Systems by AI through Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington（保罗·G·阿伦计算机科学与工程学院，华盛顿大学）；Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington（学习与脑科学研究所，华盛顿大学）
The transfer of tasks with sometimes far-reaching moral implications to autonomous systems raises a number of ethical questions. In addition to fundamental questions about the moral agency of these systems, behavioral issues arise. This article focuses on the responsibility of agents who decide on our behalf. We investigate the empirically accessible question of whether the production of moral outcomes by an agent is systematically judged differently when the agent is artificial and not human. The results of a laboratory experiment suggest that decision-makers can actually rid themselves of gu…
Increasing automation in the healthcare sector calls for a Hybrid Intelligence (HI) approach to closely study and design the collaboration of humans and autonomous machines. Ensuring that medical HI systems' decision-making is ethical is key. The use of Team Design Patterns (TDPs) can advance this goal by describing successful and reusable configurations of design problems in which decisions have a moral component, as well as through facilitating communication in multidisciplinary teams designing HI systems. For this research, TDPs were developed to describe a set of solutions for two design p…
Road vehicle travel at a reasonable speed involves some risk, even when using computer-controlled driving with failure-free hardware and perfect sensing. A fully-automated vehicle must continuously decide how to allocate this risk without a human driver's oversight. These are ethical decisions, particularly in instances where an automated vehicle cannot avoid crashing. In this chapter, I introduce the concept of moral behavior for an automated vehicle, argue the need for research in this area through responses to anticipated critiques, and discuss relevant applications from machine ethics and …
Future intelligent autonomous systems (IAS) are inevitably deciding on moral and legal questions, e.g. in self-driving cars, health care or human-machine collaboration. As decision processes in most modern sub-symbolic IAS are hidden, the simple political plea for transparency, accountability and governance falls short. A sound ecosystem of trust requires ways for IAS to autonomously justify their actions, that is, to learn giving and taking reasons for their decisions. Building on social reasoning models in moral psychology and legal philosophy such an idea of >>Reasonable Machines<< requires…
