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About

Rikhiya Ghosh is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of machine ethics, artificial consciousness, and formal moral reasoning. Her work fundamentally challenges how we think about building morally competent artificial agents, asking not just whether machines can follow rules, but whether they can possess genuine ethical understanding. Her most influential paper, "Real robots that pass human tests of self-consciousness" (84 citations), provocatively argues that self-awareness is a prerequisite for moral competence in social robots, drawing a sharp distinction between mere behavioral mimicry and true ethical agency. Ghosh extends this foundation with her formal model of "True Self-sacrifice" (2019), moving beyond traditional ethical frameworks like the Doctrine of Double Effect to capture the nuanced logic of altruistic action. More recently, she has tackled the uncomputable dimensions of moral language through hypergraphical inferential semantics (2022), and explored affect-based planning in creative machines (2023). Her work on engineering virtuous machines (2019) represents a bold attempt to operationalize virtue ethics for artificial systems—a project that remains at the frontier of AI ethics. Ghosh’s research is essential reading for anyone interested in whether machines can genuinely be good.