A scarlet warning light began to flash in the dimly lit control room. Putting down his half-eaten sandwich, the night duty engineer leant forward to read the error message on the control panel. “Peculiar, K9d exceeded movement safety limits? I’ll have to take a look”. He shut down section 9 of the automated recycling plant, shouldered his tool bag and slipped his wallet into the back pocket of his overalls. “I’ll get something from the vending machine on the way back - could be a long night”.
He entered section 9 and scanned up and down the row of Kuka RK 6 ‘pick-and-place’ robots. All but one had returned to their arm-folded shut-down position. The odd one out - K9d - had stretched its arm out away from its section of the conveyor belt and towards the vending machine. The engineer stood for a moment in disbelief. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that robot is hankering after some chocolate!”. Chuckling to himself, he dropped his tool bag next to K9d and got down on all fours. “Could be a dodgy comms port. They always put them in hard-to-reach places!”
K9d was still powered and monitoring its sensor array. It detected the movement around its base, and automatically rotated its external RGB camera towards it, scanning continuously for recognisable objects. The wallet sticking out of the engineer’s back pocket raised a ‘potentially valuable object’ flag in the robot’s deep-learning object recognition system. The robot silently calculated the inverse kinematics of the angles of its arm joints that would enable it to reach the wallet and then initiated the execution of the corresponding motion sequence. As the arm swung down, the engineer lifted his head, distracted by the noise of the motors. The elbow joint of the arm delivered a fatal blow to the engineer’s head and he slumped forward. Sensing that the wallet had moved, the robot recalculated its movement kinematics to adjust for the new position of its target and continued with its ‘pick-and-place’ sequence. The gripper at the end of K9d’s arm successfully took hold of the wallet, slid it out of the engineer’s back pocket, and placed it carefully in its valuable objects tray.
So my question to you is did K9d commit murder and theft? Many people would say ‘heck no! It’s just a machine’. But if these actions had been carried out by a human being, if a person had delivered the fatal blow to the head of the engineer and then taken their wallet, that would certainly warrant a criminal investigation. So what is it that makes the very same actions of K9d an unfortunate, if not slightly odd industrial accident rather than a crime? This is one of the issues I seek to address in my recently published book. Rise of the Moral Machine describes the emergence of a new technology called ‘moral machines’ that seeks to equip AI algorithms and robots with a capacity to perceive and respond to the ethical consequences of their choices and actions.
The recent and in some cases breath-taking advances in Artificial Intelligence have led to serious ethical concerns over the harms that this technology could cause to individuals, organisations and society at large. The root cause of these concerns comes from the fact that these decision-making algorithms are morally naïve. They have no concept of right or wrong and no capacity to recognise the potential good or evil that their ‘autonomous’ decisions and actions might have on the people they interact with. This book describes the efforts of scientists and engineers to rectify this by equipping AI algorithms and robots with a capacity to perceive and respond to the ethical consequences of their choices and actions.
I bring a unique perspective on this subject that is informed by a deep understanding of AI technology combined with a long-term amateur interest in the theology of personal moral development.
The book seeks to offer a thoughtful and accessible discussion at the intersection between AI, theology, philosophy and neuroscience. Ultimately, its aim is to alleviate the fears that many have about how AI and robotics are challenging our understanding of human identity, of which moral competence is a vital component.
