Moral Decision Making in Autonomous Systems: Enforcement, Moral Emotions, Dignity, Trust, and Deception

As humans are being progressively pushed further downstream in the decision-making process of autonomous systems, the need arises to ensure that moral standards, however defined, are adhered to by these robotic artifacts. While meaningful inroads have been made in this area regarding the use of ethical lethal military robots, including work by our laboratory, these needs transcend the warfighting domain and are pervasive, extending to eldercare, robot nannies, and other forms of service and entertainment robotic platforms. This paper presents an overview of the spectrum and specter of ethical issues raised by the advent of these systems, and various technical results obtained to date by our research group, geared towards managing ethical behavior in autonomous robots in relation to humanity. This includes: 1) the use of an ethical governor capable of restricting robotic behavior to predefined social norms; 2) an ethical adaptor which draws upon the moral emotions to allow a system to constructively and proactively modify its behavior based on the consequences of its actions; 3) the development of models of robotic trust in humans and its dual, deception, drawing on psychological models of interdependence theory; and 4) concluding with an approach towards the maintenance of dignity in human-robot relationships.

[1]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  Multiagent Mission Specification and Execution , 1997, Auton. Robots.

[2]  D. Pfaff The Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule , 2007 .

[3]  J. Tangney,et al.  Moral emotions and moral behavior. , 2007, Annual review of psychology.

[4]  C. F. Bond,et al.  The evolution of deception , 1988 .

[5]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots , 2009 .

[6]  Jack W. Tsao,et al.  Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Corrado Sinigaglia, translated by Frances Anderson, Oxford University Press (2006), ISBN-13: 978-0-19-921798-4, 242 pages, $49.95 , 2009, Journal of the Neurological Sciences.

[7]  Jonathan Gratch,et al.  Expression of Moral Emotions in Cooperating Agents , 2009, IVA.

[8]  Alan R. Wagner,et al.  Analyzing social situations for human–robot interaction , 2008 .

[9]  R. Arkin Moving Up the Food Chain: Motivation and Emotion in Behavior-Based Robots , 2003 .

[10]  Raymond C. Kurzweil,et al.  The Singularity Is Near , 2018, The Infinite Desire for Growth.

[11]  Joy Bill,et al.  Why the future doesn’t need us , 2003 .

[12]  Sara B. Kiesler,et al.  The advisor robot: tracing people's mental model from a robot's physical attributes , 2006, HRI '06.

[13]  H. Kelley,et al.  Interpersonal relations: A theory of interdependence , 1978 .

[14]  Masahiro Fujita,et al.  An ethological and emotional basis for human-robot interaction , 2003, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[15]  Selmer Bringsjord,et al.  Toward a General Logicist Methodology for Engineering Ethically Correct Robots , 2006, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[16]  M. Walzer Just and Unjust Wars , 1977 .

[17]  W. Marsden I and J , 2012 .

[18]  R. Kurzweil The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology , 2006 .

[19]  G. Rizzolatti,et al.  Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions , 2007 .

[20]  M. Hauser Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong , 2006 .

[21]  Lennart Nordenfelt,et al.  Dignity and the care of the elderly , 2003, Medicine, health care, and philosophy.

[22]  Scott Gerwehr,et al.  The Art of Darkness: Deception and Urban Operations , 2000 .

[23]  Laurence Kranich,et al.  Moral Values, Self-Regulatory Emotions and Redistribution ⁄ , 2007 .

[24]  G. Veruggio The birth of roboethics , 2005 .

[25]  A. F. Brown Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics , 2006 .

[26]  Ariel Rubinstein,et al.  A Course in Game Theory , 1995 .

[27]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  An Behavior-based Robotics , 1998 .

[28]  John Kenneth Salisbury,et al.  Playing it safe [human-friendly robots] , 2004, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[29]  Sarah F. Brosnan,et al.  Nonhuman Species’ Reactions to Inequity and their Implications for Fairness , 2006, Social Justice Research.

[30]  G. J. C. Lokhorst,et al.  Privacy, Deontic Epistemic Action Logic and Software Agents , 2006, Ethics and Information Technology.

[31]  Henry M. Levin,et al.  Worker Democracy and Worker Productivity , 2006 .

[32]  J. Horty Agency and Deontic Logic , 2001 .

[33]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  Time-Varying Affective Response for Humanoid Robots , 2009, FIRA.

[34]  S. Dubowsky,et al.  Robotic Personal Aids for Mobility and Monitoring for the Elderly , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.

[35]  David M. Amodio,et al.  PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Research Article A Dynamic Model of Guilt Implications for Motivation and Self-Regulation in the Context of Prejudice , 2022 .

[36]  Alan R. Wagner,et al.  Responsibility and Lethality for Unmanned Systems: Ethical Pre-mission Responsibility Advisement , 2009 .

[37]  R. Rosenfeld,et al.  Ethics , 2008 .

[38]  Noel Sharkey,et al.  The Ethical Frontiers of Robotics , 2008, Science.

[39]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  Acting Deceptively: Providing Robots with the Capacity for Deception , 2011, Int. J. Soc. Robotics.

[40]  R. Arkin The Case for Ethical Autonomy in Unmanned Systems , 2010 .

[41]  Flo Conway,et al.  Dark Hero of the Information Age , 2004 .

[42]  Wendell Wallach,et al.  Why Machine Ethics? , 2006, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[43]  Michael S. Gazzaniga The Ethical Brain , 2005 .

[44]  Donald A. Norman,et al.  Some observations on mental models , 1987 .

[45]  Paul De Boeck,et al.  A Componential IRT Model for Guilt , 2003 .

[46]  Donald A. Wells,et al.  An encyclopedia of war and ethics , 1996 .

[47]  J. Haidt,et al.  The Moral Emotions , 2009 .

[48]  Gianmarco Veruggio,et al.  The EURON Roboethics Roadmap , 2006, 2006 6th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots.

[49]  Richard Norman,et al.  Ethics, Killing and War , 1998 .

[50]  Paul A. M. Van Lange,et al.  An Atlas of Interpersonal Situations: Contents , 2003 .

[51]  James H. Moor,et al.  The Nature, Importance, and Difficulty of Machine Ethics , 2006, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[52]  Koji Ikuta,et al.  Safety evaluation method of human-care robot control , 2000, MHS2000. Proceedings of 2000 International Symposium on Micromechatronics and Human Science (Cat. No.00TH8530).

[53]  Michael Anderson,et al.  An Approach to Computing Ethics , 2006, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[54]  Konstantine Arkoudas,et al.  Toward Ethical Robots via Mechanized Deontic Logic∗ , 2005 .

[55]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  An ethical adaptor: Behavioral modification derived from moral emotions , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation - (CIRA).

[56]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  International Governance of Autonomous Military Robots , 2010 .

[57]  Philippe Jehiel,et al.  Towards a theory of deception , 2007 .

[58]  P. Johnson-Laird Mental models , 1989 .