Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong |  | Authors: Wendell Wallach, Colin Allen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
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Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 792042
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1
ISBN: 0195374045
Dewey Decimal Number: 629.892
EAN: 9780195374049
ASIN: 0195374045
Publication Date: November 19, 2008
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Product Description
Computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, and driving trains. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach argue that as robots take on more and more responsibility, they must be programmed with moral decision-making abilities, for our own safety. Taking a fast paced tour through the latest thinking about philosophical ethics and artificial intelligence, the authors argue that even if full moral agency for machines is a long way off, it is already necessary to start building a kind of functional morality, in which artificial moral agents have some basic ethical sensitivity. But the standard ethical theories don't seem adequate, and more socially engaged and engaging robots will be needed. As the authors show, the quest to build machines that are capable of telling right from wrong has begun.
Moral Machines is the first book to examine the challenge of building artificial moral agents, probing deeply into the nature of human decision making and ethics.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 7
 The best robot ethics text yet December 20, 2008
Keith A. Abney (San Luis Obispo, CA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Allen and Wallach's Moral Machines is the best text yet in the rapidly expanding field of robot ethics - and their work offers insight into the morals of not only robots, but ourselves as well.
Wallach and Allen examine the strengths and limitations of traditional approaches to ethics, such as deontology and utilitarianism, and the issues that arise in attempting a top-down programming of such rules into a robot. But the history of ethics is replete with controversy over the adequacy of any proposed set of rules - for instance, it might seem logical to switch the track of a runaway trolley that would kill five workers, even if it would thereby kill one person on the other track - switching maximizes utility. But should a doctor then harvest organs from a patient in for a checkup to save five people in the next room needing transplants?
So what should a robot do? An alternative is to attempt a 'bottom up' approach, and teach ethics to robots by trial and error, as we do children. The authors argue that this approach has both technical and rational limitations as well; principles are especially useful in resolving the difficult moral situations we call moral dilemmas. So they argue that a hybrid approach is probably best, and discuss in thought-provoking ways whether robots would need emotions, and how human-like we should desire these robotic agents to be.
Wallach and Allen convincingly argue that even if full moral agency for machines is a long way off, it is already necessary to start instilling into robots a type of functional morality, as robots are already engaged in high-risk situations and are already equipped with lethal weapons (e.g., the Predator drones now flying in Pakistan).
The text is anchored in near-term considerations and hence is light on some of the more far-reaching aspects of robot ethics - for instance, if full human-type ('Kantian') autonomy for robots is possible, should it be allowed? Or should robots be forever relegated to a 'slave morality', so they could never ultimately choose their own life's goals - lest they be harmful to humans? But the failure to engage in these more long-term debates simply underlines the near-term strengths of this text. For those wondering (or worried) about moral questions involving robots over the next decade, this is a must-read.
P.S. They also have a nice blog with updates: [...]
Ehtics not only for robots January 25, 2009
Michael Friedenberg (Santa Rosa, CA)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
What strikes one most reading the book is how it informs us not merely about the challenges of creating a robot or program with moral or ethical reasoning. The subtext really goes much further. Namely, what is it that actually informs morals and ethics for humanity, both for us personally and as a race. The book provides an insightful overview of the challenges scientists face in defining and in embuing a machine with the capacity for moral reasoning. That challenge is amplifed by the obvious question, what is it that gives us our capacity for the very same thing? As the reader is taken across the landscape of the current and future thinking and development of moral reasoning in machines, we begin to understand the problem is so complex and difficult because it is likewise difficult for humanity to agree upon what it is the allows us to make moral decisions. It may be that like the famous insight about pornography, "I can't define it but I know it when I see it". The authors take us on a journey that helps us see why defining it is so challenging.
All that said the main thrust also take us deeply into the exciting developments in the developments of Artificial Intelligence, from the actual to the possibilities that science fiction has presented. This will be a great resource for any reader to begin an in depth look at this facinating area.
"Moral Machines" and our impending new reality. November 10, 2008
Howard G. Iger MD (Bloomfield, CT)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong
We have been in uncharted waters for at least 94 years since 1914.
Some few gifted observers have tried to explain the past, clarify the present, and glimpse the future.
Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen have succeeded in giving us a cautionary and yet hopeful view of a future world that we are likely to be sharing with increasingly intelligent computers and their active agents...robots.
Can we form a reasonably secure community together and, if so, how can we go about achieving it.
Here in this volume in both an entertaining and highly informative manner, Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen have given us the framework for understanding the challenge.
Howard G Iger, MD
Robot Ethics Can Teach Us About Human Ethics December 9, 2008
Rodney Parrott
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
A friend gave me Moral Machines. I didn't know an AMA (Autonomous Moral Agent) from a CPA. With each well-argued case, I came to recognize how essential it is to understand, and take an active stance, on the fast-coming day of robots on the battlefield, in my bloodstream, and mining my internet messages. Professors Wallach and Allen have written a treasure-trove volume, wide in research and modest in editorial style. It will surely show up on university book lists for new-science courses and, more important to me, it should be the culminating text in every course on the history of ethics. For, as we humans try to implant moral guiding mechanisms in machines, we are forced to learn the essence of our own human moral guidance.
 Limited imaginations December 28, 2009
Peter McCluskey (San Bruno, CA USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book combines the ideas of leading commentators on ethics, methods of implementing AI, and the risks of AI, into a set of ideas on how machines ought to achieve ethical behavior.
The book mostly provides an accurate survey of what those commentators agree and disagree about. But there's enough disagreement that we need some insights into which views are correct (especially about theories of ethics) in order to produce useful advice to AI designers, and the authors don't have those kinds of insights.
The book focuses more on near term risks of software that is much less intelligent than humans, and is complacent about the risks of superhuman AI.
The implications of superhuman AIs for theories of ethics ought to illuminate flaws in them that aren't obvious when considering purely human-level intelligence. For example, they mention an argument that any AI would value humans for their diversity of ideas, which would help AIs to search the space of possible ideas. This seems to have serious problems, such as what stops an AI from fiddling with human minds to increase their diversity? Yet the authors are too focused on human-like minds to imagine an intelligence which would do that.
Their discussion of the advocates friendly AI seems a bit confused. The authors wonder if those advocates are trying to quell apprehension about AI risks, when I've observed pretty consistent efforts by those advocates to create apprehension among AI researchers.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 7
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