51,884 research outputs found
Artificial morality: Making of the artificial moral agents
Abstract:
Artificial Morality is a new, emerging interdisciplinary field that centres
around the idea of creating artificial moral agents, or AMAs, by implementing moral
competence in artificial systems. AMAs are ought to be autonomous agents capable of
socially correct judgements and ethically functional behaviour. This request for moral
machines comes from the changes in everyday practice, where artificial systems are being
frequently used in a variety of situations from home help and elderly care purposes to
banking and court algorithms. It is therefore important to create reliable and responsible
machines based on the same ethical principles that society demands from people. New
challenges in creating such agents appear. There are philosophical questions about a
machine’s potential to be an agent, or mora
l agent, in the first place. Then comes the
problem of social acceptance of such machines, regardless of their theoretic agency
status. As a result of efforts to resolve this problem, there are insinuations of needed
additional psychological (emotional and cogn
itive) competence in cold moral machines.
What makes this endeavour of developing AMAs even harder is the complexity of the
technical, engineering aspect of their creation. Implementation approaches such as top-
down, bottom-up and hybrid approach aim to find the best way of developing fully
moral agents, but they encounter their own problems throughout this effort
Taking Turing by Surprise? Designing Digital Computers for morally-loaded contexts
There is much to learn from what Turing hastily dismissed as Lady Lovelace s
objection. Digital computers can indeed surprise us. Just like a piece of art,
algorithms can be designed in such a way as to lead us to question our
understanding of the world, or our place within it. Some humans do lose the
capacity to be surprised in that way. It might be fear, or it might be the
comfort of ideological certainties. As lazy normative animals, we do need to be
able to rely on authorities to simplify our reasoning: that is ok. Yet the
growing sophistication of systems designed to free us from the constraints of
normative engagement may take us past a point of no-return. What if, through
lack of normative exercise, our moral muscles became so atrophied as to leave
us unable to question our social practices? This paper makes two distinct
normative claims:
1. Decision-support systems should be designed with a view to regularly
jolting us out of our moral torpor.
2. Without the depth of habit to somatically anchor model certainty, a
computer s experience of something new is very different from that which in
humans gives rise to non-trivial surprises. This asymmetry has key
repercussions when it comes to the shape of ethical agency in artificial moral
agents. The worry is not just that they would be likely to leap morally ahead
of us, unencumbered by habits. The main reason to doubt that the moral
trajectories of humans v. autonomous systems might remain compatible stems from
the asymmetry in the mechanisms underlying moral change. Whereas in humans
surprises will continue to play an important role in waking us to the need for
moral change, cognitive processes will rule when it comes to machines. This
asymmetry will translate into increasingly different moral outlooks, to the
point of likely unintelligibility. The latter prospect is enough to doubt the
desirability of autonomous moral agents
Enabling Robots to Communicate their Objectives
The overarching goal of this work is to efficiently enable end-users to
correctly anticipate a robot's behavior in novel situations. Since a robot's
behavior is often a direct result of its underlying objective function, our
insight is that end-users need to have an accurate mental model of this
objective function in order to understand and predict what the robot will do.
While people naturally develop such a mental model over time through observing
the robot act, this familiarization process may be lengthy. Our approach
reduces this time by having the robot model how people infer objectives from
observed behavior, and then it selects those behaviors that are maximally
informative. The problem of computing a posterior over objectives from observed
behavior is known as Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), and has been applied
to robots learning human objectives. We consider the problem where the roles of
human and robot are swapped. Our main contribution is to recognize that unlike
robots, humans will not be exact in their IRL inference. We thus introduce two
factors to define candidate approximate-inference models for human learning in
this setting, and analyze them in a user study in the autonomous driving
domain. We show that certain approximate-inference models lead to the robot
generating example behaviors that better enable users to anticipate what it
will do in novel situations. Our results also suggest, however, that additional
research is needed in modeling how humans extrapolate from examples of robot
behavior.Comment: RSS 201
Towards a Relational Understanding of the Performance Ecosystem
This article seeks to form a deeper understanding of the performance ecosystem by drawing parallels with Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics and Guattari's conception of subjectivity as outlined in Chaosmosis. Through an examination of participation within performance, and a recognition of the mutability of the roles of performer, listener, instrument and environment in the creation of the music event, this article examines the place of subjectivity, the capacity for self-creation, in the formation of a group aesthetic. Such a concept places the creation of meaning not within the individual participant but rather within the relationship between participants in a situation, a relationship that recognises the interaction between individuals, societies and institutions in its production. Such a discussion helps further our understanding of the performance ecosystem as a conceptual tool
A macroscopic analytical model of collaboration in distributed robotic systems
In this article, we present a macroscopic analytical model of collaboration in a group of reactive robots. The model consists of a series of coupled differential equations that describe the dynamics of group behavior. After presenting the general model, we analyze in detail a case study of collaboration, the stick-pulling experiment, studied experimentally and in simulation by Ijspeert et al. [Autonomous Robots, 11, 149-171]. The robots' task is to pull sticks out of their holes, and it can be successfully achieved only through the collaboration of two robots. There is no explicit communication or coordination between the robots. Unlike microscopic simulations (sensor-based or using a probabilistic numerical model), in which computational time scales with the robot group size, the macroscopic model is computationally efficient, because its solutions are independent of robot group size. Analysis reproduces several qualitative conclusions of Ijspeert et al.: namely, the different dynamical regimes for different values of the ratio of robots to sticks, the existence of optimal control parameters that maximize system performance as a function of group size, and the transition from superlinear to sublinear performance as the number of robots is increased
Motivations, Values and Emotions: 3 sides of the same coin
This position paper speaks to the interrelationships between the three concepts of motivations, values, and emotion. Motivations prime actions, values serve to choose between motivations, emotions provide a common currency for values, and emotions implement motivations. While conceptually distinct, the three are so pragmatically intertwined as to differ primarily from our taking different points of view. To make these points more transparent, we briefly describe the three in the context a cognitive architecture, the LIDA model, for software agents and robots that models human cognition, including a developmental period. We also compare the LIDA model with other models of cognition, some involving learning and emotions. Finally, we conclude that artificial emotions will prove most valuable as implementers of motivations in situations requiring learning and development
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