Synopsis

Computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, and driving trains. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach argue that as robots take on more and more responsibility, they must be programmed with moral decision-making abilities, for our own safety. Taking a fast paced tour through the latest thinking about philosophical ethics and artificial intelligence, the authors argue that even if full moral agency for machines is a long way off, it is already necessary to start building a kind of functional morality, in which artificial moral agents have some basic ethical sensitivity. But the standard ethical theories don't seem adequate, and more socially engaged and engaging robots will be needed. As the authors show, the quest to build machines that are capable of telling right from wrong has begun.

Moral Machines is the first book to examine the challenge of building artificial moral agents, probing deeply into the nature of human decision making and ethics.

Leslie Armour - Library Journal

Machines that look like people, fall in love, and wreck worlds may be on their way, Wallach (Ctr. for Bioethics, Yale Univ.) and Allen (history & philosophy of science, Indiana Univ.) suggest. Realistically, however, the problem now is with computer programs that act autonomously by playing roles in electric blackouts and blocking credit cards and machines that drive subway trains and guide military vehicles. The authors carefully examine how morality is conceptualized; on the face of it, robots can't be moral agents because intelligent machines work on a combination of fixed programs and randomizing devices that create new data from which their programs can generate novelties. Wallach and Allen don't pretend that any robots we know can have full moral agency, but they see the problem instead as being one of balancing goals and risks and keeping both within the limits that people, after rational reflection, can accept. Robots can do this balancing, they argue, and it is time to get on with it. Every library should have this book.

Biography

Wendell Wallach is a consultant and writer and is affiliated with Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics.

Colin Allen is a Professor of History & Philosophy of Science and of Cognitive Science at Indiana University