What Do We Owe to Intelligent Robots?

摘要

In recent years, the interdisciplinary field of machine ethics – that is, how to program robots with ethical rules, so that they become either implicit or ex-plicit moral agents (Moor 2006) – has become of utmost importance because of current and anticipated technological developments in the fields of com-puter sciences, artificial intelligence (ai), and robotics (Lin et al. 2014; Wallach and Allen 2010; Anderson and Anderson 2011; Gunkel and Bryson 2014a, b). Ma-chine ethics considers the implications of making artificially intelligent robots (henceforth irs) “ethical”2 and examines related issues such as whether irs have moral status or not, including moral and legal3 rights. Whether this is even possible is a matter of great debate among researchers working in the field of machine ethics. For example, Johnson and Axinn (2014, 4) take a criti-cal viewpoint, arguing that autonomous robots only mimic ethics, since they lack “the imagination to conceive of the effects should the principle of their actions be made universal, as well as the free will to make the choice to follow a moral style”; Rodogno (2016, 12) claims, “The day in which robots fulfil the conditions of moral agency and moral patience outlined here, however, will be the day in which they will be emotive creatures capable of humanly recogniz-able interests.”[...]