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10 results

  • 6 - What Matters to a Machine?
  • from PART III - ISSUES CONCERNING MACHINE ETHICS
  • Edited by Michael Anderson, University of Hartford, Connecticut, Susan Leigh Anderson, University of Connecticut
  • Book: Machine Ethics
  • Published online: 01 June 2011
  • Print publication: 09 May 2011, pp 88-114
  • View extract

    Summary

    Why Is Machine Ethics Interesting?

    There has recently been a flurry of activity in the area of “machine ethics” [38, 4, 3, 5, 58]. My purpose in this article is to argue that ethical behavior is an extremely difficult area to automate, both because it requires “solving all of AI” and because even that might not be sufficient.

    Why is machine ethics interesting? Why do people think we ought to study it now? If we're not careful, the reason might come down to the intrinsic fascination of the phrase “machine ethics.” The title of one recent review of the field is Moral Machines. One's first reaction is that moral machines are to be contrasted with … what? Amoral machines? Immoral machines? What would make a machine ethical or unethical? Any cognitive scientist would love to know the answer to these questions.

    However, it turns out that the field of machine ethics has little to say about them. So far, papers in this area can usefully be classified as focusing on one, maybe two, of the following topics:

    1. Altruism: The use of game-theoretic simulations to explore the rationality or evolution of altruism [9, 12].

    2. Constraint: How computers can be used unethically, and how to program them so that it is provable that they do not do something unethical [28, 29], such as violate someone's privacy.

    3. Reasoning: The implementation of theories of ethical reasoning [38, 4] for its own sake, or to help build artificial ethical advisors.

    4. […]

  • Dodging the explanatory gap – or bridging it
  • Drew McDermott
  • Journal: Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 30 / Issue 5-6 / December 2007
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 March 2008, p. 518
  • View abstract

    Assuming our understanding of the brain continues to advance, we will at some point have a computational theory of how access consciousness works. Block's supposed additional kind of consciousness will not appear in this theory, and continued belief in it will be difficult to sustain. Appeals to “what it's like” to experience such-and-such will carry little weight when we cannot locate a subject for whom it might be like something.

  • Chapter 6 - Artificial intelligence and consciousness
  • from Part I - The cognitive science of consciousness
  • Edited by Philip David Zelazo, University of Toronto, Morris Moscovitch, University of Toronto, Evan Thompson, University of York
  • Book: The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness
  • Published online: 05 June 2012
  • Print publication: 14 May 2007, pp -
  • View extract

    Summary

    Consciousness is only marginally relevant to artificial intelligence (AI), because to most researchers in the field other problems seem more pressing. The purpose of consciousness, from an evolutionary perspective, is often held to have something to do with the allocation and organization of scarce cognitive resources. This chapter describes Daniel Dennett's idea of the intentional stance, in which an observer explains a system's behavior by invoking such intentional categories as beliefs and goals. The computationalist theory of phenomenal consciousness ends up looking like a spoil-sport's explanation of a magic trick. The chapter focuses on critiques that are specifically directed at computational models of consciousness, as opposed to general critiques of materialist explanation. The contribution of artificial intelligence to consciousness studies has been slender so far, because almost everyone in the field would rather work on better defined, less controversial problems.
  • A vehicle with no wheels
  • Drew McDermott
  • Journal: Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 22 / Issue 1 / February 1999
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 1999, p. 161
  • View abstract

    O'Brien & Opie's theory fails to address the issue of consciousness and introspection. They take for granted that once something is experienced, it can be commented on. But introspection requires neural structures that, according to their theory, have nothing to do with experience as such. That makes the tight coupling between the two in humans a mystery.