Sharing Moral Responsibility with Robots: A Pragmatic Approach

Roboethics is a recently developed field of applied ethics which deals with the ethical aspects of technologies such as robots, ambient intelligence, direct neural interfaces and invasive nano-devices and intelligent soft bots. In this article we look specifically at the issue of (moral) responsibility in artificial intelligent systems. We argue for a pragmatic approach, where responsibility is seen as a social regulatory mechanism. We claim that having a system which takes care of certain tasks intelligently, learning from experience and making autonomous decisions gives us reasons to talk about a system (an artifact) as being "responsible" for a task. No doubt, technology is morally significant for humans, so the "responsibility for a task" with moral consequences could be seen as moral responsibility. Intelligent systems can be seen as parts of socio-technological systems with distributed responsibilities, where responsible (moral) agency is a matter of degree. K...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SCAI
• Authors: Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, Daniel Persson
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligent Systems, Intelligent Soft Bots, Intelligent Systems, SCAI 2008