36 Just ordinAry robots
We may even lose the skills. e recent British decision to rein-
stall a nuclear energy programme highlights that. From the moment
Britain decided to stop investing in nuclear plants some years ago,
nuclear skills went into decline. Now the new plants will have to be
built by France. You may or may not like nuclear energy, but this
shows how some things are doable only when there are human beings
able to do it.
One of the worries about social robots is that they are devoid of morality.
But according to some, they can become moral agents in their own right,
given the right software. Do you have a position in that debate?
I was one of the rst to write about this, in the late nineties. You can
approach articial agents in two ways. One is asking, who can be a
moral agent? I argued that we should dene ‘moral agent’ in an inclu-
sive way, including for instance political parties and families, but also
animals and machines, since there is a lot of agency in the world that
is not based on human individuals. e other perspective is the one
that your question is addressing. What happens when smart robots
with a lot of autonomy, such as we might be building in 10 or 20years,
are in charge of actions with huge moral implications, in warfare,
healthcare, education, social interaction?
ere are three dierent strategies to deal with this. One says, ‘We
need to develop a morality for machines.’ I think this is utter science
ction; a pipe dream, or a pipe nightmare. It can be fun to think
about, but increasingly I think it is irresponsible to spend money and
energy on this. Because it can’t be done. Not in a very long time.
e second, more responsible strategy is to make sure that these
machines have some safety measures implanted. To grasp the con-
cept, think of microwave ovens: you cannot commit suicide by putting
your head in them, because they won’t work when the door is open.
e machine is not moral in itself, but we can design standards that
are morally good. In the case of drones, we could decide internation-
ally that they cannot possibly re under certain conditions or that,
if they lose control, they will go to the nearest sea and drown them-
selves. is is not as exciting as ‘moral machines,’ but on the plus side,
it is doable.
e third strategy, which can go together with the second, is to
have a human in control. Not in-the-loop—the robot can operate on
37robots everywhere
its own—but on-the-loop, supervising—if something goes wrong, it
can be stopped. It’s like the Mars Rovers: they are autonomous, but
NASA can intervene.
Unfortunately, quite a few people keep believing in the moral-
machine option. Some think that machines can develop morality the
way babies do, on the basis of feedback to their actions. But really,
there is nothing in computer science at the moment to justify think-
ing that this is even remotely feasible. For lets face it, we dont even
have articial intelligence yet; we have articial smartness. I remem-
ber how John McCarthy, who coined the word AI, was deeply disap-
pointed with Deep Blue, the chess computer who beat Kasparov, but
only because it had a database lled with matches played by humans.
My wife, who is a neuroscientist here in Oxford, tells me we still
know very little about human intelligence, so how can we build an
articial version? We have discovered this new continent, the human
brain, but we’ve only just set foot on the beach. Can we reproduce a
continent on the basis of a mere beach? Yet there is a whole church of
believers in articial intelligence and you can’t talk them out of their
faith. Ive given up trying.
EXPERT INTERVIEWS AS A BONUS
At the end of each chapter, except for the conclusive one, the reader
will nd an elaborate interview with an internationally acknowl-
edged expert. After Chapters 1 through 6, interviews can be read
from, respectively: Luciano Floridi (Philosopher and Ethicist
of Information at Oxford University in the United Kingdom),
Kerstin Dautenbach (Professor of Articial Intelligence at the
University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom), Hans
Rietman (Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
at Twente University of Technology in the Netherlands), Mark
Wiebes (Innovation Manager with the Dutch National Police),
Bryant Walker Smith (Assistant Professor of Law at the University
of South Carolina in the United States), and Jürgen Altmann
(Physicist and Peace Researcher at TU Dortmund University in
Germany). All these interviews have been conducted and written
by Gaston Dorren.
38 Just ordinAry robots
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