YSM 85-3

ROBOTICS
Moral agency increases as autonomy and ethical sensitivity increase. Courtesy of
Moral Machines (Oxford University Press)
beginning to have driverless cars on the road,
and soon there will be surveillance drones in
domestic airspace. We are not far away from
introducing a robot to take care of the elderly
at home. We already have low-budget robots
that entertain: robotnannies and robopets.”
With the advent of robots in daily life, many
security, privacy, and legal quagmires remain
unresolved. Robots placed in domestic environments
pose privacy concerns. To perform
their job, they likely need to record and process
private information. If they are connected
to the Internet, then they can potentially be
hacked. The security for a robot performing
a critical role, such as pacemakers, cars, or
planes is even more paramount. Failure could
be catastrophic and directly result in deaths.
Google’s self-driving cars, which are being
piloted in Nevada, pose legal issues as well.
How do we legally resolve a complicated accident
involving a self-driving car? What should
a self-driving car do if a situation forces it to
choose between two options that both might
cause loss of human life? Wallach proposes a
question: suppose self-driving cars are found
to cause 50 percent fewer accidents than
human drivers. Should we reward the robot
companies for reducing deaths, or will we sue
them for accidents in which robot cars were
involved? Wallach says, “If you can’t solve
these ethical problems of who’s culpable and
who’s liable, you’ll have public concern about
letting robots into the commerce of daily life.
If you can, new markets open up.”
The Future of Machine Morality
Wallach ultimately tries to anticipate what
sort of frameworks could be put in place to
minimize the risks and maximize the benefits
of a robot-pervasive society. Wallach points
out that considering the ethical implications
About the Author
Sherwin Yu is a senior in Morse College studying Computer Science and Molecular
Biophysics & Biochemistry.
Acknowledgements
As robots become more advanced and
involved in our lives, tackling potential
ethical issues also becomes more important.
Courtesy of NASA
of AMAs falls into the broader discipline of
engineering ethics and safety. Engineers need
to be sensitive to these ideas when they think
about the safety of their systems. Balancing
safety and societal benefit has always been
a core responsibility of engineering; today’s
systems, however, are rapidly approaching the
complexity where the systems themselves will
need to make moral decisions. Thus, Wallach
explains that “moral decision making can be
thought of as a natural extension to engineering
safety for systems with more autonomy
and intelligence.”
When asked whether ethics should be a
priority, Wallach responds with fervor: “I think
it will have to be. There remain some technical
challenges, but we will have to think through
these problems eventually for our society to be
comfortable accepting robots and AI as part
of everyday life.”
The author would like to thank Wendell Wallach for his help in writing this article.
Further Reading
• Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong (Oxford University Press
2009). Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen
• Robots to Techno Sapiens: Ethics, Law and Public Policy in the Development of
Robotics and Neurotechnologies. Wendell Wallach. Law, Innovation and Tchnology
(2011) 3:185-207.
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April 2012 | Yale Scientific Magazine 23