Iva Smit

Papers

Total Citations

412

H-Index

About

Iva Smit is a pioneering researcher in the field of machine ethics, a discipline concerned with embedding moral decision-making capabilities into autonomous systems, computers, and robots. Her foundational 2006 paper, "Why Machine Ethics?" — now cited over 233 times — helped establish the legitimacy and urgency of the field at a time when such questions were often dismissed as science fiction. Smit argued compellingly that as autonomous systems grow increasingly sophisticated, the need to encode ethical reasoning into machines becomes not merely theoretical but practically imperative. Her 2007 work on bottom-up and top-down approaches to modelling human moral faculties, with 154 citations, deepened the theoretical scaffolding of the field, offering researchers concrete frameworks for thinking about how morality might be computationally represented. Her recurring return to the "Why Machine Ethics?" question across multiple decades — revisiting it in 2011 and again in 2020 — reflects her sustained commitment to evolving the conversation alongside rapid advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. For students entering AI ethics or human-robot interaction, Smit's work represents essential reading at the intersection of philosophy, computer science, and moral theory.