May Machines Take Lives to Save Lives? Human Perceptions of Autonomous Robots (with the Capacity to Kill)

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-102
Author(s):  
Matthias Scheutz ◽  
Bertram F. Malle

In the future, artificial agents are likely to make life-and-death decisions about humans. Ordinary people are the likely arbiters of whether these decisions are morally acceptable. We summarize research on how ordinary people evaluate artificial (compared to human) agents that make life-and-death decisions. The results suggest that many people are inclined to morally evaluate artificial agents’ decisions, and when asked how the artificial and human agents should decide, they impose the same norms on them. However, when confronted with how the agents did in fact decide, people judge the artificial agents’ decisions differently from those of humans. This difference is best explained by justifications people grant the human agents (imagining their experience of the decision situation) but do not grant the artificial agent (whose experience they cannot imagine). If people fail to infer the decision processes and justifications of artificial agents, these agents will have to explicitly communicate such justifications to people, so they can understand and accept their decisions.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 310-335
Author(s):  
Selmer Bringsjord ◽  
Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu ◽  
Michael Giancola

Abstract Suppose an artificial agent a adj {a}_{\text{adj}} , as time unfolds, (i) receives from multiple artificial agents (which may, in turn, themselves have received from yet other such agents…) propositional content, and (ii) must solve an ethical problem on the basis of what it has received. How should a adj {a}_{\text{adj}} adjudicate what it has received in order to produce such a solution? We consider an environment infused with logicist artificial agents a 1 , a 2 , … , a n {a}_{1},{a}_{2},\ldots ,{a}_{n} that sense and report their findings to “adjudicator” agents who must solve ethical problems. (Many if not most of these agents may be robots.) In such an environment, inconsistency is a virtual guarantee: a adj {a}_{\text{adj}} may, for instance, receive a report from a 1 {a}_{1} that proposition ϕ \phi holds, then from a 2 {a}_{2} that ¬ ϕ \neg \phi holds, and then from a 3 {a}_{3} that neither ϕ \phi nor ¬ ϕ \neg \phi should be believed, but rather ψ \psi instead, at some level of likelihood. We further assume that agents receiving such incompatible reports will nonetheless sometimes simply need, before long, to make decisions on the basis of these reports, in order to try to solve ethical problems. We provide a solution to such a quandary: AI capable of adjudicating competing reports from subsidiary agents through time, and delivering to humans a rational, ethically correct (relative to underlying ethical principles) recommendation based upon such adjudication. To illuminate our solution, we anchor it to a particular scenario.


2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (01) ◽  
pp. 97-121
Author(s):  
Neeraj Dwivedi ◽  
Arvinder Singh

The case presents a decision situation facing the Vice President of strategic planning at Piramal Diagnostics Limited, who has to formulate the future growth strategy and decide on the roadmap. The company is the largest player in the organized medical diagnostics industry in India and has shown attractive growth in the past few years. The case describes the structural characteristics of the medical diagnostics industry in India and follows it with a description of the strengths and weaknesses of Piramal Diagnostics and the strategies adopted by it. The Vice President is expected to choose an appropriate strategic option to help the company achieve its ambitious growth target.


Author(s):  
James D. Nichols ◽  
K. Ullas Karanth ◽  
Arjun M. Gopalaswamy ◽  
G. Viswanatha Reddy ◽  
John M. Goodrich ◽  
...  

2011 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 12-16
Author(s):  
Jutta Geldermann ◽  
Valentin Bertsch ◽  
Florian Gering

Komplexe Entscheidungssituationen, wie sie beispielsweise im Notfall- und Sanierungsmanagement nach einem kerntechnischen Störfall auftreten, erfordern eine Berücksichtigung technischer, ökonomischer, ökologischer, sozio-psychologischer und politischer Aspekte. Ansätze der Mehrzielentscheidungsunterstützung ermöglichen eine aggregierte Betrachtung verschiedener Aspekte, das Miteinbeziehen der subjektiven Präferenzen der Entscheidungsträger und tragen zu mehr Transparenz und Nachvollziehbarkeit von Entscheidungsprozessen bei. Dieser Beitrag befasst sich schwerpunktmäßig mit der Betrachtung von Unsicherheiten in solchen Entscheidungsprozessen. Zur Modellierung, Fortpflanzung und Visualisierung von Unsicherheiten wird ein Monte-Carlo-Ansatz vorgestellt und beispielhaft auf Daten eines fiktiven nuklearen Unfallszenarios angewendet. Generell ist der Ansatz jedoch auf allgemeine komplexe Entscheidungssituationen erweiterbar, insbesondere auf den Bereich sonstiger industrieller Notfälle. Eine interessante Fragestellung besteht weiterhin in der Untersuchung der Auswirkungen industrieller Notfälle auf die gesamte Wertschöpfungskette. Der erste Teil des Aufsatzes wurde bereits in Der Betriebswirt 1/2011 veröffentlicht, der letzte Teil folgt in Ausgabe 3/2011. Complex decision situations, such as in nuclear emergency and remediation management, require the consideration of technical, economic, ecological, socio-psychological and political aspects. Approaches for Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) help to take into account various incommensurable aspects and subjective preferences of the decision makers and thus contribute to transparency and traceability of decision processes. This paper focuses on the handling of uncertainties in such decision processes. Monte Carlo approaches can be used to model, propagate and finally visualise the uncertainties, as a case study on a hypothetical radiological accident scenario illustrates. In general, the presented approach can be adopted for any complex decision situation, especially for industrial emergencies. Further research would be necessary for the analysis of their consequences for entire supply chains. Keywords: risiko und notfallmanagement unter unsicherheit


Author(s):  
Rejane Pinheiro ◽  
Elizabeth Furtado

This article aims to develop a new environment of collaborative learning, by taking into account the criteria of construction of knowledge by the apprentices and the adaptative management of that knowledge by artificial agents. The multi-agent technology has been chosen due to the possibility of having artificial agents with internal decision processes to help students in the construction of their own projects and enabling learning objects available in accordance with the cognitive characteristics of the students and of their group. In this multi-agent system, exchanges of messages between the agents can occur so that they can perform theirs tasks in the best possible way.


2003 ◽  
Vol 41 (9) ◽  
pp. 883-892 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Pech ◽  
Bret W. Slade

Disputatio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (53) ◽  
pp. 89-110
Author(s):  
Carl David Mildenberger

Abstract In this paper, I am concerned with what automation—widely considered to be the “future of work”—holds for the artificially intelligent agents we aim to employ. My guiding question is whether it is normatively problematic to employ artificially intelligent agents like, for example, autonomous robots as workers. The answer I propose is the following. There is nothing inherently normatively problematic about employing autonomous robots as workers. Still, we must not put them to perform just any work, if we want to avoid blame. This might not sound like much of a limitation. Interestingly, however, we can argue for this claim based on metaphysically and normatively parsimonious grounds. Namely, all I rely on when arguing for my claim is that the robots we aim to employ exhibit a kind of autonomy.


1950 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-56
Author(s):  
C. I. Scharling

The Second Coming of Christ and the Resurrection of the Body. Grundtvigs Eschatology. By C. I. Scharling. This essay shows how Grundtvig, in contrast to his contemporaries in the Church, laid great stress upon the eschatological hope of the future. He may have been partly inspired by Scandinavian mythology (the myth of Ragnarok) and partly by Schellings theories about the great drama of existence (the coming forth of ideas from the Absolute and their returning thither). But the essential point is that the eschatological hope grew forth naturally from his personal understanding of life and death, of the meaning and object of human life, and from his faith in the living, risen Christ as Lord and victor over the powers of darkness and death. It is remarkable that while after 1825 Grundtvig lived with such intensity in the experience of the realisation of the Kingdom of God here and now in the Church’s fellowship with the risen, present Saviour, at the same time, both in his hymns and in his preaching, he gives such powerful expression to the eschatological hope of the future. The author finds the explanation of this in the fact that for Grundtvig (unlike many others) it was not the need and distress of the time that gave life to the Biblical promises of the Second Coming of Christ and the setting*up of the Kingdom of Glory at the Last Day, but his very joy in God’s great Salvation, experienced in the Church. Thus the peculiar thing about Grundtvig’s eschatological expectation is that the tidings of the Second Coming of the Lord are for him an evangel in the full sense of the word; his feelings about the Last Day are far removed from the feeling of fear and horror which meets us in many of the mediaeval frescoes of the Lord’s Return to Judgment or in the old hymn, “Dies irae, dies ilia”. Characteristic of him, too, is his stress on the contin uity between the present world, which came into being at the Creation, and the world to come; the old world shall not be destroyed, but reborn and transfigured; its for this reason that he lays so much stress on faith in the resurrection of the body. On the other hand the author rejects the theory put forward by the Norwegian writer, Paulus Svendsen, that Grundtvig was a Chiliast and “believed in an external, perfect Kingdom of God on earth” ; he refutes it by reference to the fact that Grundtvig explicitly rejected Edward Irving’s conception of the millennium.


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