Consequentialism & Machine Ethics: Towards a Foundational Machine Ethic to Ensure the Right Action of Artificial Moral Agents

In this paper, I argue that Consequentialism represents a kind of ethical theory that is the most plausible to serve as a basis for a machine ethic. First, I outline the concept of an artificial moral agent and the essential properties of Consequentialism. Then, I present a scenario involving autonomous vehicles to illustrate how the features of Consequentialism inform agent action. Thirdly, an alternative Deontological approach will be evaluated and the problem of moral conflict discussed. Finally, two bottom-up approaches to the development of machine ethics are presented and briefly challenged

Entanglement of Indistinguishable Particles

We present a general criterion for entanglement of N indistinguishable particles decomposed into arbitrary s subsystems based on the unambiguous measurability of correlation. Our argument provides a unified viewpoint on the entanglement of indistinguishable particles, which is still unsettled despite various proposals made mainly for the s = 2 case. Even though entanglement is defined only with reference to the measurement setup, we find that the so-called i.i.d. states form a special class of bosonic states which are universally separable.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, major revisio

Optimum unambiguous identification of d unknown pure qudit states

We address the problem of unambiguously identifying the state of a probe qudit with the state of one of d reference qudits. The reference states are assumed pure and linearly independent but we have no knowledge of them. The state of the probe qudit is assumed to coincide equally likely with either one of the d unknown reference states. We derive the optimum measurement strategy that maximizes the success probability of unambiguous identification and find that the optimum strategy is a generalized measurement. We give both the measurement operators and the optimum success probability explicitly. Technically, the problem we solve amounts to the optimum unambiguous discrimination of d known mixed quantum states.Comment: A reference has been included and a sign error has been corrected that propagated and affected the final result and is unfortunately also present in the printed journal versio

General criterion for the entanglement of two indistinguishable particles

We relate the notion of entanglement for quantum systems composed of two identical constituents to the impossibility of attributing a complete set of properties to both particles. This implies definite constraints on the mathematical form of the state vector associated with the whole system. We then analyze separately the cases of fermion and boson systems, and we show how the consideration of both the Slater-Schmidt number of the fermionic and bosonic analog of the Schmidt decomposition of the global state vector and the von Neumann entropy of the one-particle reduced density operators can supply us with a consistent criterion for detecting entanglement. In particular, the consideration of the von Neumann entropy is particularly useful in deciding whether the correlations of the considered states are simply due to the indistinguishability of the particles involved or are a genuine manifestation of the entanglement. The treatment leads to a full clarification of the subtle aspects of entanglement of two identical constituents which have been a source of embarrassment and of serious misunderstandings in the recent literature.Comment: 18 pages, Latex; revised version: Section 3.2 rewritten, new Theorems added, reference [1] corrected. To appear on Phys.Rev.A 70, (2004