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Colloquia Archive

Machine Morality: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong

January 25, 2008

Host: Karl F. MacDorman

Abstract

The hyper-intelligent machines of science fiction are years away, perhaps even impossible to achieve. However, computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, driving trains, and directing other tasks that affect our well being. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Everyone whose life is affected by computers and robots making decisions on their own—which is to say, virtually everyone living in the modern world—needs to be assured that these autonomous systems will act in our best interests. Rosalind Picard put it well when she wrote, "The greater the freedom of a machine, the more it will need moral standards."

In a forthcoming book with the same title as this talk, Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen call for robots and computers to be programmed with moral decision-making abilities. But is this desirable or possible? The book, and this talk, will explore six questions: Do we need artificial moral agents? When? For what? Do we want computers making ethical decisions? Whose morality or what morality? How can we make ethics computable?

Biography

Colin Allen is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he has been since 2004. He also holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Philosophy, and is a faculty member of IU's Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior. His main area of research is on the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, particularly with respect to nonhuman animals, but he has also published on other topics in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology, and artificial intelligence. He also has worked extensively on web-based projects in philosophy. Allen is Associate Editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and director of the Indiana Philosophy Ontology project (InPhO), which in 2007 was awarded a Digital Humanities startup grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also Associate Editor of the Noesis philosophy search engine and co-developer of two logic instructional sites on the Web.