Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and

Robotics
First published Thu Apr 30, 2020
Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are digital technologies that will have
significant impact on the development of humanity in the near future. They have
raised fundamental questions about what we should do with these systems, what the
systems themselves should do, what risks they involve, and how we can control
these.
After the Introduction to the field (§1), the main themes (§2) of this article are:
Ethical issues that arise with AI systems as objects, i.e., tools made and used by
humans. This includes issues of privacy (§2.1) and manipulation (§2.2), opacity
(§2.3) and bias (§2.4), human-robot interaction (§2.5), employment (§2.6), and the
effects of autonomy (§2.7). Then AI systems as subjects, i.e., ethics for the AI
systems themselves in machine ethics (§2.8) and artificial moral agency (§2.9).
Finally, the problem of a possible future AI superintelligence leading to a
“singularity” (§2.10). We close with a remark on the vision of AI (§3).
For each section within these themes, we provide a general explanation of
the ethical issues, outline existing positions and arguments, then analyse how these
play out with current technologies and finally, what policy consequences may be
drawn.

 1. Introduction
o 1.1 Background of the Field
o 1.2 AI & Robotics
o 1.3 A Note on Policy
 2. Main Debates
o 2.1 Privacy & Surveillance
o 2.2 Manipulation of Behaviour
o 2.3 Opacity of AI Systems
o 2.4 Bias in Decision Systems
o 2.5 Human-Robot Interaction
o 2.6 Automation and Employment
o 2.7 Autonomous Systems
o 2.8 Machine Ethics
o 2.9 Artificial Moral Agents
o 2.10 Singularity
  3. Closing
 Bibliography
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
o References
o Research Organizations
o Conferences
o Policy Documents
o Other Relevant pages
 Related Entries

1. Introduction
1.1 Background of the Field
The ethics of AI and robotics is often focused on “concerns” of various sorts, which
is a typical response to new technologies. Many such concerns turn out to be rather
quaint (trains are too fast for souls); some are predictably wrong when they suggest
that the technology will fundamentally change humans (telephones will destroy
personal communication, writing will destroy memory, video cassettes will make
going out redundant); some are broadly correct but moderately relevant (digital
technology will destroy industries that make photographic film, cassette tapes, or
vinyl records); but some are broadly correct and deeply relevant (cars will kill
children and fundamentally change the landscape). The task of an article such as this
is to analyse the issues and to deflate the non-issues.
Some technologies, like nuclear power, cars, or plastics, have caused ethical and
political discussion and significant policy efforts to control the trajectory these
technologies, usually only once some damage is done. In addition to such “ethical
concerns”, new technologies challenge current norms and conceptual systems,
which is of particular interest to philosophy. Finally, once we have understood a
technology in its context, we need to shape our societal response, including
regulation and law. All these features also exist in the case of new AI and Robotics
technologies—plus the more fundamental fear that they may end the era of human
control on Earth.
The ethics of AI and robotics has seen significant press coverage in recent years,
which supports related research, but also may end up undermining it: the press often
talks as if the issues under discussion were just predictions of what future
technology will bring, and as though we already know what would be most ethical
and how to achieve that. Press coverage thus focuses on risk, security (Brundage et
al. 2018, see under Other Internet Resources [hereafter OIR]), and prediction of
impact (e.g., on the job market). The result is a discussion of essentially technical
problems that focus on how to achieve a desired outcome. Current discussions in
policy and industry are also motivated by image and public relations, where the label
“ethical” is really not much more than the new “green”, perhaps used for “ethics
washing”. For a problem to qualify as a problem for AI ethics would require that we
do not readily know what the right thing to do is. In this sense, job loss, theft, or
killing with AI is not a problem in ethics, but whether these are permissible under
certain circumstances is a problem. This article focuses on the genuine problems of
ethics where we do not readily know what the answers are.
A last caveat: The ethics of AI and robotics is a very young field within applied
ethics, with significant dynamics, but few well-established issues and no
authoritative overviews—though there is a promising outline (European Group on
Ethics in Science and New Technologies 2018) and there are beginnings on societal
impact (Floridi et al. 2018; Taddeo and Floridi 2018; S. Taylor et al. 2018; Walsh
2018; Bryson 2019; Gibert 2019; Whittlestone et al. 2019), and policy
recommendations (AI HLEG 2019 [OIR]; IEEE 2019). So this article cannot merely
reproduce what the community has achieved thus far, but must propose an ordering
where little order exists.

1.2 AI & Robotics

The notion of “artificial intelligence” (AI) is understood broadly as any kind of
artificial computational system that shows intelligent behaviour, i.e., complex
behaviour that is conducive to reaching goals. In particular, we do not wish to
restrict “intelligence” to what would require intelligence if done by humans, as
Minsky had suggested (1985). This means we incorporate a range of machines,
including those in “technical AI”, that show only limited abilities in learning or
reasoning but excel at the automation of particular tasks, as well as machines in
“general AI” that aim to create a generally intelligent agent.
AI somehow gets closer to our skin than other technologies—thus the field of
“philosophy of AI”. Perhaps this is because the project of AI is to create machines
that have a feature central to how we humans see ourselves, namely as feeling,
thinking, intelligent beings. The main purposes of an artificially intelligent agent
probably involve sensing, modelling, planning and action, but current AI
applications also include perception, text analysis, natural language processing
(NLP), logical reasoning, game-playing, decision support systems, data analytics,
predictive analytics, as well as autonomous vehicles and other forms of robotics (P.
Stone et al. 2016). AI may involve any number of computational techniques to
achieve these aims, be that classical symbol-manipulating AI, inspired by natural
cognition, or machine learning via neural networks (Goodfellow, Bengio, and
Courville 2016; Silver et al. 2018).
Historically, it is worth noting that the term “AI” was used as above ca. 1950–1975,
then came into disrepute during the “AI winter”, ca. 1975–1995, and narrowed. As a
result, areas such as “machine learning”, “natural language processing” and “data
science” were often not labelled as “AI”. Since ca. 2010, the use has broadened
again, and at times almost all of computer science and even high-tech is lumped
under “AI”. Now it is a name to be proud of, a booming industry with massive
capital investment (Shoham et al. 2018), and on the edge of hype again. As Erik
Brynjolfsson noted, it may allow us to
virtually eliminate global poverty, massively reduce disease and provide better
education to almost everyone on the planet. (quoted in Anderson, Rainie, and
Luchsinger 2018)
While AI can be entirely software, robots are physical machines that move. Robots
are subject to physical impact, typically through “sensors”, and they exert physical
force onto the world, typically through “actuators”, like a gripper or a turning wheel.
Accordingly, autonomous cars or planes are robots, and only a minuscule portion of
robots is “humanoid” (human-shaped), like in the movies. Some robots use AI, and
some do not: Typical industrial robots blindly follow completely defined scripts
with minimal sensory input and no learning or reasoning (around 500,000 such new
industrial robots are installed each year (IFR 2019 [OIR])). It is probably fair to say
that while robotics systems cause more concerns in the general public, AI systems
are more likely to have a greater impact on humanity. Also, AI or robotics systems
for a narrow set of tasks are less likely to cause new issues than systems that are
more flexible and autonomous.
Robotics and AI can thus be seen as covering two overlapping sets of systems:
systems that are only AI, systems that are only robotics, and systems that are both.
We are interested in all three; the scope of this article is thus not only the
intersection, but the union, of both sets.

1.3 A Note on Policy

Policy is only one of the concerns of this article. There is significant public
discussion about AI ethics, and there are frequent pronouncements from politicians
that the matter requires new policy, which is easier said than done: Actual
technology policy is difficult to plan and enforce. It can take many forms, from
incentives and funding, infrastructure, taxation, or good-will statements, to
regulation by various actors, and the law. Policy for AI will possibly come into
conflict with other aims of technology policy or general policy. Governments,
parliaments, associations, and industry circles in industrialised countries have
produced reports and white papers in recent years, and some have generated good-
will slogans (“trusted/responsible/humane/human-centred/good/beneficial AI”), but
is that what is needed? For a survey, see Jobin, Ienca, and Vayena (2019) and V.
Müller’s list of PT-AI Policy Documents and Institutions.
For people who work in ethics and policy, there might be a tendency to overestimate
the impact and threats from a new technology, and to underestimate how far current
regulation can reach (e.g., for product liability). On the other hand, there is a
tendency for businesses, the military, and some public administrations to “just talk”
and do some “ethics washing” in order to preserve a good public image and continue
as before. Actually implementing legally binding regulation would challenge
existing business models and practices. Actual policy is not just an implementation
of ethical theory, but subject to societal power structures—and the agents that do
have the power will push against anything that restricts them. There is thus a
significant risk that regulation will remain toothless in the face of economical and
political power.
Though very little actual policy has been produced, there are some notable
beginnings: The latest EU policy document suggests “trustworthy AI” should be
lawful, ethical, and technically robust, and then spells this out as seven
requirements: human oversight, technical robustness, privacy and data governance,
transparency, fairness, well-being, and accountability (AI HLEG 2019 [OIR]). Much
European research now runs under the slogan of “responsible research and
innovation” (RRI), and “technology assessment” has been a standard field since the
advent of nuclear power. Professional ethics is also a standard field in information
technology, and this includes issues that are relevant in this article. Perhaps a “code
of ethics” for AI engineers, analogous to the codes of ethics for medical doctors, is
an option here (Véliz 2019). What data science itself should do is addressed in (L.
Taylor and Purtova 2019). We also expect that much policy will eventually cover
specific uses or technologies of AI and robotics, rather than the field as a whole. A
useful summary of an ethical framework for AI is given in (European Group on
Ethics in Science and New Technologies 2018: 13ff). On general AI policy, see
Calo (2018) as well as Crawford and Calo (2016); Stahl, Timmermans, and
Mittelstadt (2016); Johnson and Verdicchio (2017); and Giubilini and Savulescu
(2018). A more political angle of technology is often discussed in the field of
“Science and Technology Studies” (STS). As books like The Ethics of
Invention (Jasanoff 2016) show, concerns in STS are often quite similar to those in
ethics (Jacobs et al. 2019 [OIR]). In this article, we discuss the policy for each type
of issue separately rather than for AI or robotics in general.

2. Main Debates
In this section we outline the ethical issues of human use of AI and robotics systems
that can be more or less autonomous—which means we look at issues that arise with
certain uses of the technologies which would not arise with others. It must be kept in
mind, however, that technologies will always cause some uses to be easier, and thus
more frequent, and hinder other uses. The design of technical artefacts thus has
ethical relevance for their use (Houkes and Vermaas 2010; Verbeek 2011), so
beyond “responsible use”, we also need “responsible design” in this field. The focus
on use does not presuppose which ethical approaches are best suited for tackling
these issues; they might well be virtue ethics (Vallor 2017) rather than
consequentialist or value-based (Floridi et al. 2018). This section is also neutral with
respect to the question whether AI systems truly have “intelligence” or other mental
properties: It would apply equally well if AI and robotics are merely seen as the
current face of automation (cf. Müller forthcoming-b).

2.1 Privacy & Surveillance

There is a general discussion about privacy and surveillance in information
technology (e.g., Macnish 2017; Roessler 2017), which mainly concerns the access
to private data and data that is personally identifiable. Privacy has several well
recognised aspects, e.g., “the right to be let alone”, information privacy, privacy as
an aspect of personhood, control over information about oneself, and the right to
secrecy (Bennett and Raab 2006). Privacy studies have historically focused on state
surveillance by secret services but now include surveillance by other state agents,
businesses, and even individuals. The technology has changed significantly in the
last decades while regulation has been slow to respond (though there is the
Regulation (EU) 2016/679)—the result is a certain anarchy that is exploited by the
most powerful players, sometimes in plain sight, sometimes in hiding.
The digital sphere has widened greatly: All data collection and storage is now
digital, our lives are increasingly digital, most digital data is connected to a single
Internet, and there is more and more sensor technology in use that generates data
about non-digital aspects of our lives. AI increases both the possibilities of
intelligent data collection and the possibilities for data analysis. This applies to
blanket surveillance of whole populations as well as to classic targeted surveillance.
In addition, much of the data is traded between agents, usually for a fee.
At the same time, controlling who collects which data, and who has access, is much
harder in the digital world than it was in the analogue world of paper and telephone
calls. Many new AI technologies amplify the known issues. For example, face
recognition in photos and videos allows identification and thus profiling and
searching for individuals (Whittaker et al. 2018: 15ff). This continues using other
techniques for identification, e.g., “device fingerprinting”, which are commonplace
on the Internet (sometimes revealed in the “privacy policy”). The result is that “In
this vast ocean of data, there is a frighteningly complete picture of us” (Smolan
2016: 1:01). The result is arguably a scandal that still has not received due public
attention.
The data trail we leave behind is how our “free” services are paid for—but we are
not told about that data collection and the value of this new raw material, and we are
manipulated into leaving ever more such data. For the “big 5” companies (Amazon,
Google/Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook), the main data-collection part of
their business appears to be based on deception, exploiting human weaknesses,
furthering procrastination, generating addiction, and manipulation (Harris 2016
[OIR]). The primary focus of social media, gaming, and most of the Internet in this
“surveillance economy” is to gain, maintain, and direct attention—and thus data
supply. “Surveillance is the business model of the Internet” (Schneier 2015). This
surveillance and attention economy is sometimes called “surveillance capitalism”
(Zuboff 2019). It has caused many attempts to escape from the grasp of these
corporations, e.g., in exercises of “minimalism” (Newport 2019), sometimes through
the open source movement, but it appears that present-day citizens have lost the
degree of autonomy needed to escape while fully continuing with their life and
work. We have lost ownership of our data, if “ownership” is the right relation here.
Arguably, we have lost control of our data.
These systems will often reveal facts about us that we ourselves wish to suppress or
are not aware of: they know more about us than we know ourselves. Even just
observing online behaviour allows insights into our mental states (Burr and
Christianini 2019) and manipulation (see below section 2.2). This has led to calls for
the protection of “derived data” (Wachter and Mittelstadt 2019). With the last
sentence of his bestselling book, Homo Deus, Harari asks about the long-term
consequences of AI:
What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly
intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves? (2016: 462)
Robotic devices have not yet played a major role in this area, except for security
patrolling, but this will change once they are more common outside of industry
environments. Together with the “Internet of things”, the so-called “smart” systems
(phone, TV, oven, lamp, virtual assistant, home,…), “smart city” (Sennett 2018),
and “smart governance”, they are set to become part of the data-gathering machinery
that offers more detailed data, of different types, in real time, with ever more
information.
Privacy-preserving techniques that can largely conceal the identity of persons or
groups are now a standard staple in data science; they include (relative)
anonymisation , access control (plus encryption), and other models where
computation is carried out with fully or partially encrypted input data (Stahl and
Wright 2018); in the case of “differential privacy”, this is done by adding calibrated
noise to encrypt the output of queries (Dwork et al. 2006; Abowd 2017). While
requiring more effort and cost, such techniques can avoid many of the privacy
issues. Some companies have also seen better privacy as a competitive advantage
that can be leveraged and sold at a price.
One of the major practical difficulties is to actually enforce regulation, both on the
level of the state and on the level of the individual who has a claim. They must
identify the responsible legal entity, prove the action, perhaps prove intent, find a
court that declares itself competent … and eventually get the court to actually
enforce its decision. Well-established legal protection of rights such as consumer
rights, product liability, and other civil liability or protection of intellectual property
rights is often missing in digital products, or hard to enforce. This means that
companies with a “digital” background are used to testing their products on the
consumers without fear of liability while heavily defending their intellectual
property rights. This “Internet Libertarianism” is sometimes taken to assume that
technical solutions will take care of societal problems by themselves (Mozorov
2013).

2.2 Manipulation of Behaviour

The ethical issues of AI in surveillance go beyond the mere accumulation of data
and direction of attention: They include the use of information to manipulate
behaviour, online and offline, in a way that undermines autonomous rational choice.
Of course, efforts to manipulate behaviour are ancient, but they may gain a new
quality when they use AI systems. Given users’ intense interaction with data
systems and the deep knowledge about individuals this provides, they are vulnerable
to “nudges”, manipulation, and deception. With sufficient prior data, algorithms can
be used to target individuals or small groups with just the kind of input that is likely
to influence these particular individuals.
Many advertisers, marketers, and online sellers will use any legal means at their
disposal, including exploitation of behavioural biases, deception, and addiction
generation (Costa and Halpern 2019 [OIR])—e.g., through “dark patterns” on web
pages or in games (Mathur et al. 2019). Such manipulation is the business model in
much of the gambling and gaming industries, but it is spreading, e.g., to low-cost
airlines. Gambling and the sale of addictive substances are highly regulated, but
online manipulation and addiction are not. Manipulation of online behaviour is
becoming a core business model of the Internet.
Furthermore, social media is now the prime location for political propaganda. This
influence can be used to steer voting behaviour, as in the Facebook-Cambridge
Analytica “scandal” (Woolley and Howard 2017; Bradshaw, Neudert, and Howard
2019) and—if successful—it may harm the autonomy of individuals (Susser,
Roessler, and Nissenbaum 2019).
Improved AI “faking” technologies make what once was reliable evidence into
unreliable evidence—this has already happened to digital photos, sound recordings,
and video. It will soon be quite easy to create (rather than alter) “deep fake” text,
photos, and video material with any desired content. Soon, sophisticated real-time
interaction with persons over text, phone, or video will be faked, too. So we cannot
trust digital interactions while we are at the same time increasingly dependent on
such interactions.
One more specific issue is that machine learning techniques in AI rely on training
with vast amounts of data. This means there will often be a trade-off between
privacy and rights to data vs. technical quality of the product. This influences the
consequentialist evaluation of privacy-violating practices.
The policy in this field has its ups and downs: Civil liberties and the protection of
individual rights are under intense pressure from businesses’ lobbying, secret
services, and other state agencies that depend on surveillance. Privacy protection has
diminished massively compared to the pre-digital age when communication was
based on letters, analogue telephone communications, and personal conversation and
when surveillance operated under significant legal constraints.
While the EU General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) has
strengthened privacy protection, the US and China prefer growth with less
regulation (Thompson and Bremmer 2018), likely in the hope that this provides a
competitive advantage. It is clear that state and business actors have increased their
ability to invade privacy and manipulate people with the help of AI technology and
will continue to do so to further their particular interests—unless reined in by policy
in the interest of general society.

2.3 Opacity of AI Systems

Opacity and bias are central issues in what is now sometimes called “data ethics” or
“big data ethics” (Floridi and Taddeo 2016; Mittelstadt and Floridi 2016). AI
systems for automated decision support and “predictive analytics” raise “significant
concerns about lack of due process, accountability, community engagement, and
auditing” (Whittaker et al. 2018: 18ff). They are part of a power structure in which
“we are creating decision-making processes that constrain and limit opportunities for
human participation” (Danaher 2016b: 245). At the same time, it will often be
impossible for the affected person to know how the system came to this output, i.e.,
the system is “opaque” to that person. If the system involves machine learning, it
will typically be opaque even to the expert, who will not know how a particular
pattern was identified, or even what the pattern is. Bias in decision systems and data
sets is exacerbated by this opacity. So, at least in cases where there is a desire to
remove bias, the analysis of opacity and bias go hand in hand, and political response
has to tackle both issues together.
Many AI systems rely on machine learning techniques in (simulated) neural
networks that will extract patterns from a given dataset, with or without “correct”
solutions provided; i.e., supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. With these
techniques, the “learning” captures patterns in the data and these are labelled in a
way that appears useful to the decision the system makes, while the programmer
does not really know which patterns in the data the system has used. In fact, the
programs are evolving, so when new data comes in, or new feedback is given (“this
was correct”, “this was incorrect”), the patterns used by the learning system change.
What this means is that the outcome is not transparent to the user or programmers: it
is opaque. Furthermore, the quality of the program depends heavily on the quality of
the data provided, following the old slogan “garbage in, garbage out”. So, if the data
already involved a bias (e.g., police data about the skin colour of suspects), then the
program will reproduce that bias. There are proposals for a standard description of
datasets in a “datasheet” that would make the identification of such bias more
feasible (Gebru et al. 2018 [OIR]). There is also significant recent literature about
the limitations of machine learning systems that are essentially sophisticated data
filters (Marcus 2018 [OIR]). Some have argued that the ethical problems of today
are the result of technical “shortcuts” AI has taken (Cristianini forthcoming).
There are several technical activities that aim at “explainable AI”, starting with (Van
Lent, Fisher, and Mancuso 1999; Lomas et al. 2012) and, more recently, a DARPA
programme (Gunning 2017 [OIR]). More broadly, the demand for
a mechanism for elucidating and articulating the power structures, biases, and
influences that computational artefacts exercise in society (Diakopoulos 2015: 398)
is sometimes called “algorithmic accountability reporting”. This does not mean that
we expect an AI to “explain its reasoning”—doing so would require far more serious
moral autonomy than we currently attribute to AI systems (see below §2.10).
The politician Henry Kissinger pointed out that there is a fundamental problem for
democratic decision-making if we rely on a system that is supposedly superior to
humans, but cannot explain its decisions. He says we may have “generated a
potentially dominating technology in search of a guiding philosophy” (Kissinger
2018). Danaher (2016b) calls this problem the “algocracy”. In a similar vein, Cave
(2019) stresses that we need a broader societal move towards more “democratic”
decision-making to avoid AI being a force that leads to a Kafka-style impenetrable
suppression system in public administration and elsewhere. The political angle of
this discussion has been stressed by O’Neil in her influential book Weapons of Math
Destruction (2016), and by Yeung and Lodge (2019).
In the EU, some of these issues have been taken into account with the (Regulation
(EU) 2016/679), which foresees that consumers, when faced with a decision based
on data processing, will have a legal “right to explanation”—how far this goes and
to what extent it can be enforced is disputed (Goodman and Flaxman 2017; Wachter,
Mittelstadt, and Floridi 2016; Wachter, Mittelstadt, and Russell 2017). Zerilli et al.
(2019) argue that there may be a double standard here, where we demand a high
level of explanation for machine-based decisions despite humans sometimes not
reaching that standard themselves.

2.4 Bias in Decision Systems

Automated AI decision support systems and “predictive analytics” operate on data
and produce a decision as “output”. This output may range from the relatively trivial
to the highly significant: “this restaurant matches your preferences”, “the patient in
this X-ray has completed bone growth”, “application to credit card declined”,
“donor organ will be given to another patient”, “bail is denied”, or “target identified
and engaged”. Data analysis is often used in “predictive analytics” in business,
healthcare, and other fields, to foresee future developments—since prediction is
easier, it will also become a cheaper commodity. One use of prediction is in
“predictive policing” (NIJ 2014 [OIR]), which many fear might lead to an erosion of
public liberties (Ferguson 2017) because it can take away power from the people
whose behaviour is predicted. It appears, however, that many of the worries about
policing depend on futuristic scenarios where law enforcement foresees and
punishes planned actions, rather than waiting until a crime has been committed (like
in the 2002 film “Minority Report”). One concern is that these systems might
perpetuate bias that was already in the data used to set up the system, e.g., by
increasing police patrols in an area and discovering more crime in that area. Actual
“predictive policing” or “intelligence led policing” techniques mainly concern the
question of where and when police forces will be needed most. Also, police officers
can be provided with more data, offering them more control and facilitating better
decisions, in workflow support software (e.g., “ArcGIS”). Whether this is
problematic depends on the appropriate level of trust in the technical quality of these
systems, and on the evaluation of aims of the police work itself. Perhaps a recent
paper title points in the right direction here: “AI ethics in predictive policing: From
models of threat to an ethics of care” (Asaro 2019).
Bias typically surfaces when unfair judgments are made because the individual
making the judgment is influenced by a characteristic that is actually irrelevant to
the matter at hand, typically a discriminatory preconception about members of a
group. So, one form of bias is a learned cognitive feature of a person, often not made
explicit. The person concerned may not be aware of having that bias—they may
even be honestly and explicitly opposed to a bias they are found to have (e.g.,
through priming, cf. Graham and Lowery 2004). On fairness vs. bias in machine
learning, see Binns (2018).
Apart from the social phenomenon of learned bias, the human cognitive system is
generally prone to have various kinds of “cognitive biases”, e.g., the “confirmation
bias”: humans tend to interpret information as confirming what they already believe.
This second form of bias is often said to impede performance in rational judgment
(Kahnemann 2011)—though at least some cognitive biases generate an evolutionary
advantage, e.g., economical use of resources for intuitive judgment. There is a
question whether AI systems could or should have such cognitive bias.
A third form of bias is present in data when it exhibits systematic error, e.g.,
“statistical bias”. Strictly, any given dataset will only be unbiased for a single kind
of issue, so the mere creation of a dataset involves the danger that it may be used for
a different kind of issue, and then turn out to be biased for that kind. Machine
learning on the basis of such data would then not only fail to recognise the bias, but
codify and automate the “historical bias”. Such historical bias was discovered in an
automated recruitment screening system at Amazon (discontinued early 2017) that
discriminated against women—presumably because the company had a history of
discriminating against women in the hiring process. The “Correctional Offender
Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions” (COMPAS), a system to predict
whether a defendant would re-offend, was found to be as successful (65.2%
accuracy) as a group of random humans (Dressel and Farid 2018) and to produce
more false positives and less false negatives for black defendants. The problem with
such systems is thus bias plus humans placing excessive trust in the systems. The
political dimensions of such automated systems in the USA are investigated in
Eubanks (2018).
There are significant technical efforts to detect and remove bias from AI systems,
but it is fair to say that these are in early stages: see UK Institute for Ethical AI &
Machine Learning (Brownsword, Scotford, and Yeung 2017; Yeung and Lodge
2019). It appears that technological fixes have their limits in that they need a
mathematical notion of fairness, which is hard to come by (Whittaker et al. 2018:
24ff; Selbst et al. 2019), as is a formal notion of “race” (see Benthall and Haynes
2019). An institutional proposal is in (Veale and Binns 2017).

2.5 Human-Robot Interaction

Human-robot interaction (HRI) is an academic fields in its own right, which now
pays significant attention to ethical matters, the dynamics of perception from both
sides, and both the different interests present in and the intricacy of the social
context, including co-working (e.g., Arnold and Scheutz 2017). Useful surveys for
the ethics of robotics include Calo, Froomkin, and Kerr (2016); Royakkers and van
Est (2016); Tzafestas (2016); a standard collection of papers is Lin, Abney, and
Jenkins (2017).
While AI can be used to manipulate humans into believing and doing things
(see section 2.2), it can also be used to drive robots that are problematic if their
processes or appearance involve deception, threaten human dignity, or violate the
Kantian requirement of “respect for humanity”. Humans very easily attribute mental
properties to objects, and empathise with them, especially when the outer
appearance of these objects is similar to that of living beings. This can be used to
deceive humans (or animals) into attributing more intellectual or even emotional
significance to robots or AI systems than they deserve. Some parts of humanoid
robotics are problematic in this regard (e.g., Hiroshi Ishiguro’s remote-controlled
Geminoids), and there are cases that have been clearly deceptive for public-relations
purposes (e.g., Hanson Robotics’ “Sophia”). Of course, some fairly basic constraints
of business ethics and law apply to robots, too: product safety and liability, or non-
deception in advertisement. It appears that these existing constraints take care of
many concerns that are raised. There are cases, however, where human-human
interaction has aspects that appear specifically human in ways that can perhaps not
be replaced by robots: care, love, and sex.
2.5.1 Example (a) Care Robots
The use of robots in health care for humans is currently at the level of concept
studies in real environments, but it may become a usable technology in a few years,
and has raised a number of concerns for a dystopian future of de-humanised care (A.
Sharkey and N. Sharkey 2011; Robert Sparrow 2016). Current systems include
robots that support human carers/caregivers (e.g., in lifting patients, or transporting
material), robots that enable patients to do certain things by themselves (e.g., eat
with a robotic arm), but also robots that are given to patients as company and
comfort (e.g., the “Paro” robot seal). For an overview, see van Wynsberghe (2016);
Nørskov (2017); Fosch-Villaronga and Albo-Canals (2019), for a survey of users
Draper et al. (2014).
One reason why the issue of care has come to the fore is that people have argued
that we will need robots in ageing societies. This argument makes problematic
assumptions, namely that with longer lifespan people will need more care, and that it
will not be possible to attract more humans to caring professions. It may also show a
bias about age (Jecker forthcoming). Most importantly, it ignores the nature of
automation, which is not simply about replacing humans, but about allowing
humans to work more efficiently. It is not very clear that there really is an issue here
since the discussion mostly focuses on the fear of robots de-humanising care, but the
actual and foreseeable robots in care are assistive robots for classic automation of
technical tasks. They are thus “care robots” only in a behavioural sense of
performing tasks in care environments, not in the sense that a human “cares” for the
patients. It appears that the success of “being cared for” relies on this intentional
sense of “care”, which foreseeable robots cannot provide. If anything, the risk of
robots in care is the absence of such intentional care—because less human carers
may be needed. Interestingly, caring for something, even a virtual agent, can be
good for the carer themselves (Lee et al. 2019). A system that pretends to care
would be deceptive and thus problematic—unless the deception is countered by
sufficiently large utility gain (Coeckelbergh 2016). Some robots that pretend to
“care” on a basic level are available (Paro seal) and others are in the making.
Perhaps feeling cared for by a machine, to some extent, is progress for come
patients.
2.5.2 Example (b) Sex Robots
It has been argued by several tech optimists that humans will likely be interested in
sex and companionship with robots and be comfortable with the idea (Levy 2007).
Given the variation of human sexual preferences, including sex toys and sex dolls,
this seems very likely: The question is whether such devices should be manufactured
and promoted, and whether there should be use limits in this murky area. It seems to
have moved into the mainstream of “robot philosophy” in recent times (Sullins
2012; Danaher and McArthur 2017; N. Sharkey et al. 2017 [OIR]; Bendel 2018;
Devlin 2018).
Humans have long had deep emotional attachments to objects, so perhaps
companionship or even love with a predictable android is attractive, especially to
people who struggle with actual humans, and already prefer dogs, cats, birds, a
computer or a tamagotchi. Danaher (2019b) argues against (Nyholm and Frank
2017) that these can be true friendships, and is thus a valuable goal. It certainly
looks like such friendship might increase overall utility, even if lacking in depth. In
these discussions there is an issue of deception, since a robot cannot (at present)
mean what it says, or have feelings for a human. It is well known that humans are
prone to attribute feelings and thoughts to entities that behave as if they had
sentience,even to clearly inanimate objects that show no behaviour at all. Also,
paying for deception seems to be an elementary part of the traditional sex industry.
Finally, there are concerns that have often accompanied matters of sex, namely
consent (Frank and Nyholm 2017), aesthetic concerns, and the worry that humans
may be “corrupted” by certain experiences. Old fashioned though this may seem,
human behaviour is influenced by experience, and it is likely that pornography or
sex robots support the perception of other humans as mere objects of desire, or even
recipients of abuse, and thus ruin a deeper sexual and erotic experience. The
“Campaign Against Sex Robots” argues that these devices are a continuation of
slavery and prostitution (Richardson 2016).

2.6 Automation and Employment

It seems clear that AI and robotics will lead to significant gains in productivity and
thus overall wealth. The attempt to increase productivity has often been a feature of
the economy, though the emphasis on “growth” is a modern phenomenon (Harari
2016: 240). However, productivity gains through automation typically mean that
fewer humans are required for the same output. This does not necessarily imply a
loss of overall employment, however, because available wealth increases and that
can increase demand sufficiently to counteract the productivity gain. In the long run,
higher productivity in industrial societies has led to more wealth overall. Major
labour market disruptions have occurred in the past, e.g., farming employed over
60% of the workforce in Europe and North-America in 1800, while by 2010 it
employed ca. 5% in the EU, and even less in the wealthiest countries (European
Commission 2013). In the 20 years between 1950 and 1970 the number of hired
agricultural workers in the UK was reduced by 50% (Zayed and Loft 2019).
Classic automation replaced human muscle, whereas digital automation replaces
human thought or information-processing—and unlike physical machines, digital
automation is very cheap to duplicate (Bostrom and Yudkowsky 2014). It may thus
mean a more radical change on the labour market. So, the main question is: will the
effects be different this time? Will the creation of new jobs and wealth keep up with
the destruction of jobs? And even if it is not different, what are the transition costs,
and who bears them? Do we need to make societal adjustments for a fair distribution
of costs and benefits of digital automation?
Responses to the issue of unemployment from AI have ranged from the alarmed
(Frey and Osborne 2013; Westlake 2014) to the neutral (Metcalf, Keller, and Boyd
2016 [OIR]; Calo 2018; Frey 2019) to the optimistic (Brynjolfsson and McAfee
2016; Harari 2016; Danaher 2019a). In principle, the labour market effect of
automation seems to be fairly well understood as involving two channels:
(i) the nature of interactions between differently skilled workers and new
technologies affecting labour demand and (ii) the equilibrium effects of
technological progress through consequent changes in labour supply and product
markets. (Goos 2018: 362)
What currently seems to happen in the labour market as a result of AI and robotics
automation is “job polarisation” or the “dumbbell” shape (Goos, Manning, and
Salomons 2009): The highly skilled technical jobs are in demand and highly paid,
the low skilled service jobs are in demand and badly paid, but the mid-qualification
jobs in factories and offices, i.e., the majority of jobs, are under pressure and
reduced because they are relatively predictable, and most likely to be automated
(Baldwin 2019).
Perhaps enormous productivity gains will allow the “age of leisure” to be realised,
something (Keynes 1930) had predicted to occur around 2030, assuming a growth
rate of 1% per annum. Actually, we have already reached the level he anticipated for
2030, but we are still working—consuming more and inventing ever more levels of
organisation. Harari explains how this economic development allowed humanity to
overcome hunger, disease, and war—and now we aim for immortality and eternal
bliss through AI, thus his title Homo Deus (Harari 2016: 75).
In general terms, the issue of unemployment is an issue of how goods in a society
should be justly distributed. A standard view is that distributive justice should be
rationally decided from behind a “veil of ignorance” (Rawls 1971), i.e., as if one
does not know what position in a society one would actually be taking (labourer or
industrialist, etc.). Rawls thought the chosen principles would then support basic
liberties and a distribution that is of greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members
of society. It would appear that the AI economy has three features that make such
justice unlikely: First, it operates in a largely unregulated environment where
responsibility is often hard to allocate. Second, it operates in markets that have a
“winner takes all” feature where monopolies develop quickly. Third, the “new
economy” of the digital service industries is based on intangible assets, also called
“capitalism without capital” (Haskel and Westlake 2017). This means that it is
difficult to control multinational digital corporations that do not rely on a physical
plant in a particular location. These three features seem to suggest that if we leave
the distribution of wealth to free market forces, the result would be a heavily unjust
distribution: And this is indeed a development that we can already see.
One interesting question that has not received too much attention is whether the
development of AI is environmentally sustainable: Like all computing systems, AI
systems produce waste that is very hard to recycle and they consume vast amounts
of energy, especially for the training of machine learning systems (and even for the
“mining” of cryptocurrency). Again, it appears that some actors in this space offload
such costs to the general society.

2.7 Autonomous Systems

There are several notions of autonomy in the discussion of autonomous systems. A
stronger notion is involved in philosophical debates where autonomy is the basis for
responsibility and personhood (Christman 2003 [2018]). In this context,
responsibility implies autonomy, but not inversely, so there can be systems that have
degrees of technical autonomy without raising issues of responsibility. The weaker,
more technical, notion of autonomy in robotics is relative and gradual: A system is
said to be autonomous with respect to human control to a certain degree (Müller
2012). There is a parallel here to the issues of bias and opacity in AI since autonomy
also concerns a power-relation: who is in control, and who is responsible?
Generally speaking, one question is the degree to which autonomous robots raise
issues our present conceptual schemes must adapt to, or whether they just require
technical adjustments. In most jurisdictions, there is a sophisticated system of civil
and criminal liability to resolve such issues. Technical standards, e.g., for the safe
use of machinery in medical environments, will likely need to be adjusted. There is
already a field of “verifiable AI” for such safety-critical systems and for “security
applications”. Bodies like the IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers) and the BSI (British Standards Institution) have produced “standards”,
particularly on more technical sub-problems, such as data security and transparency.
Among the many autonomous systems on land, on water, under water, in air or
space, we discuss two samples: autonomous vehicles and autonomous weapons.
2.7.1 Example (a) Autonomous Vehicles
Autonomous vehicles hold the promise to reduce the very significant damage that
human driving currently causes—approximately 1 million humans being killed per
year, many more injured, the environment polluted, earth sealed with concrete and
tarmac, cities full of parked cars, etc. However, there seem to be questions on how
autonomous vehicles should behave, and how responsibility and risk should be
distributed in the complicated system the vehicles operates in. (There is also
significant disagreement over how long the development of fully autonomous, or
“level 5” cars (SAE International 2018) will actually take.)
There is some discussion of “trolley problems” in this context. In the classic “trolley
problems” (Thomson 1976; Woollard and Howard-Snyder 2016: section 2) various
dilemmas are presented. The simplest version is that of a trolley train on a track that
is heading towards five people and will kill them, unless the train is diverted onto a
side track, but on that track there is one person, who will be killed if the train takes
that side track. The example goes back to a remark in (Foot 1967: 6), who discusses
a number of dilemma cases where tolerated and intended consequences of an action
differ. “Trolley problems” are not supposed to describe actual ethical problems or to
be solved with a “right” choice. Rather, they are thought-experiments where choice
is artificially constrained to a small finite number of distinct one-off options and
where the agent has perfect knowledge. These problems are used as a theoretical
tool to investigate ethical intuitions and theories—especially the difference between
actively doing vs. allowing something to happen, intended vs. tolerated
consequences, and consequentialist vs. other normative approaches (Kamm 2016).
This type of problem has reminded many of the problems encountered in actual
driving and in autonomous driving (Lin 2016). It is doubtful, however, that an actual
driver or autonomous car will ever have to solve trolley problems (but see Keeling
2020). While autonomous car trolley problems have received a lot of media
attention (Awad et al. 2018), they do not seem to offer anything new to either ethical
theory or to the programming of autonomous vehicles.
The more common ethical problems in driving, such as speeding, risky overtaking,
not keeping a safe distance, etc. are classic problems of pursuing personal interest
vs. the common good. The vast majority of these are covered by legal regulations on
driving. Programming the car to drive “by the rules” rather than “by the interest of
the passengers” or “to achieve maximum utility” is thus deflated to a standard
problem of programming ethical machines (see section 2.9). There are probably
additional discretionary rules of politeness and interesting questions on when to
break the rules (Lin 2016), but again this seems to be more a case of applying
standard considerations (rules vs. utility) to the case of autonomous vehicles.
Notable policy efforts in this field include the report (German Federal Ministry of
Transport and Digital Infrastructure 2017), which stresses that safety is the primary
objective. Rule 10 states
In the case of automated and connected driving systems, the accountability that was
previously the sole preserve of the individual shifts from the motorist to the
manufacturers and operators of the technological systems and to the bodies
responsible for taking infrastructure, policy and legal decisions.
(See section 2.10.1 below). The resulting German and EU laws on licensing
automated driving are much more restrictive than their US counterparts where
“testing on consumers” is a strategy used by some companies—without informed
consent of the consumers or their possible victims.
2.7.2 Example (b) Autonomous Weapons
The notion of automated weapons is fairly old:
For example, instead of fielding simple guided missiles or remotely piloted vehicles,
we might launch completely autonomous land, sea, and air vehicles capable of
complex, far-ranging reconnaissance and attack missions. (DARPA 1983: 1)
This proposal was ridiculed as “fantasy” at the time (Dreyfus, Dreyfus, and
Athanasiou 1986: ix), but it is now a reality, at least for more easily identifiable
targets (missiles, planes, ships, tanks, etc.), but not for human combatants. The main
arguments against (lethal) autonomous weapon systems (AWS or LAWS), are that
they support extrajudicial killings, take responsibility away from humans, and make
wars or killings more likely—for a detailed list of issues see Lin, Bekey, and Abney
(2008: 73–86).
It appears that lowering the hurdle to use such systems (autonomous vehicles, “fire-
and-forget” missiles, or drones loaded with explosives) and reducing the probability
of being held accountable would increase the probability of their use. The crucial
asymmetry where one side can kill with impunity, and thus has few reasons not to
do so, already exists in conventional drone wars with remote controlled weapons
(e.g., US in Pakistan). It is easy to imagine a small drone that searches, identifies,
and kills an individual human—or perhaps a type of human. These are the kinds of
cases brought forward by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and other activist
groups. Some seem to be equivalent to saying that autonomous weapons are indeed
weapons …, and weapons kill, but we still make them in gigantic numbers. On the
matter of accountability, autonomous weapons might make identification and
prosecution of the responsible agents more difficult—but this is not clear, given the
digital records that one can keep, at least in a conventional war. The difficulty of
allocating punishment is sometimes called the “retribution gap” (Danaher 2016a).
Another question is whether using autonomous weapons in war would make wars
worse, or make wars less bad. If robots reduce war crimes and crimes in war, the
answer may well be positive and has been used as an argument in favour of these
weapons (Arkin 2009; Müller 2016a) but also as an argument against them
(Amoroso and Tamburrini 2018). Arguably the main threat is not the use of such
weapons in conventional warfare, but in asymmetric conflicts or by non-state agents,
including criminals.
It has also been said that autonomous weapons cannot conform to International
Humanitarian Law, which requires observance of the principles of distinction
(between combatants and civilians), proportionality (of force), and military necessity
(of force) in military conflict (A. Sharkey 2019). It is true that the distinction
between combatants and non-combatants is hard, but the distinction between civilian
and military ships is easy—so all this says is that we should not construct and use
such weapons if they do violate Humanitarian Law. Additional concerns have been
raised that being killed by an autonomous weapon threatens human dignity, but even
the defenders of a ban on these weapons seem to say that these are not good
arguments:
There are other weapons, and other technologies, that also compromise human
dignity. Given this, and the ambiguities inherent in the concept, it is wiser to draw
on several types of objections in arguments against AWS, and not to rely exclusively
on human dignity. (A. Sharkey 2019)
A lot has been made of keeping humans “in the loop” or “on the loop” in the
military guidance on weapons—these ways of spelling out “meaningful control” are
discussed in (Santoni de Sio and van den Hoven 2018). There have been discussions
about the difficulties of allocating responsibility for the killings of an autonomous
weapon, and a “responsibility gap” has been suggested (esp. Rob Sparrow 2007),
meaning that neither the human nor the machine may be responsible. On the other
hand, we do not assume that for every event there is someone responsible for that
event, and the real issue may well be the distribution of risk (Simpson and Müller
2016). Risk analysis (Hansson 2013) indicates it is crucial to identify who
is exposed to risk, who is a potential beneficiary, and who makes
the decisions (Hansson 2018: 1822–1824).

2.8 Machine Ethics

Machine ethics is ethics for machines, for “ethical machines”, for machines
as subjects, rather than for the human use of machines as objects. It is often not very
clear whether this is supposed to cover all of AI ethics or to be a part of it (Floridi
and Saunders 2004; Moor 2006; Anderson and Anderson 2011; Wallach and Asaro
2017). Sometimes it looks as though there is the (dubious) inference at play here that
if machines act in ethically relevant ways, then we need a machine ethics.
Accordingly, some use a broader notion:
machine ethics is concerned with ensuring that the behavior of machines toward
human users, and perhaps other machines as well, is ethically acceptable. (Anderson
and Anderson 2007: 15)
This might include mere matters of product safety, for example. Other authors sound
rather ambitious but use a narrower notion:
AI reasoning should be able to take into account societal values, moral and ethical
considerations; weigh the respective priorities of values held by different
stakeholders in various multicultural contexts; explain its reasoning; and guarantee
transparency. (Dignum 2018: 1, 2)
Some of the discussion in machine ethics makes the very substantial assumption that
machines can, in some sense, be ethical agents responsible for their actions, or
“autonomous moral agents” (see van Wynsberghe and Robbins 2019). The basic
idea of machine ethics is now finding its way into actual robotics where the
assumption that these machines are artificial moral agents in any substantial sense is
usually not made (Winfield et al. 2019). It is sometimes observed that a robot that is
programmed to follow ethical rules can very easily be modified to follow unethical
rules (Vanderelst and Winfield 2018).
The idea that machine ethics might take the form of “laws” has famously been
investigated by Isaac Asimov, who proposed “three laws of robotics” (Asimov
1942):
First Law—A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a
human being to come to harm. Second Law—A robot must obey the orders given it
by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Third
Law—A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not
conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Asimov then showed in a number of stories how conflicts between these three laws
will make it problematic to use them despite their hierarchical organisation.
It is not clear that there is a consistent notion of “machine ethics” since weaker
versions are in danger of reducing “having an ethics” to notions that would not
normally be considered sufficient (e.g., without “reflection” or even without
“action”); stronger notions that move towards artificial moral agents may describe a
—currently—empty set.

2.9 Artificial Moral Agents

If one takes machine ethics to concern moral agents, in some substantial sense, then
these agents can be called “artificial moral agents”, having rights and
responsibilities. However, the discussion about artificial entities challenges a
number of common notions in ethics and it can be very useful to understand these in
abstraction from the human case (cf. Misselhorn 2020; Powers and Ganascia
forthcoming).
Several authors use “artificial moral agent” in a less demanding sense, borrowing
from the use of “agent” in software engineering in which case matters of
responsibility and rights will not arise (Allen, Varner, and Zinser 2000). James Moor
(2006) distinguishes four types of machine agents: ethical impact agents (e.g., robot
jockeys), implicit ethical agents (e.g., safe autopilot), explicit ethical agents (e.g.,
using formal methods to estimate utility), and full ethical agents (who “can make
explicit ethical judgments and generally is competent to reasonably justify them. An
average adult human is a full ethical agent”.) Several ways to achieve “explicit” or
“full” ethical agents have been proposed, via programming it in (operational
morality), via “developing” the ethics itself (functional morality), and finally full-
blown morality with full intelligence and sentience (Allen, Smit, and Wallach 2005;
Moor 2006). Programmed agents are sometimes not considered “full” agents
because they are “competent without comprehension”, just like the neurons in a
brain (Dennett 2017; Hakli and Mäkelä 2019).
In some discussions, the notion of “moral patient” plays a role: Ethical agents have
responsibilities while ethical patients have rights because harm to them matters. It
seems clear that some entities are patients without being agents, e.g., simple animals
that can feel pain but cannot make justified choices. On the other hand, it is
normally understood that all agents will also be patients (e.g., in a Kantian
framework). Usually, being a person is supposed to be what makes an entity a
responsible agent, someone who can have duties and be the object of ethical
concerns. Such personhood is typically a deep notion associated with phenomenal
consciousness, intention and free will (Frankfurt 1971; Strawson 1998). Torrance
(2011) suggests “artificial (or machine) ethics could be defined as designing
machines that do things that, when done by humans, are indicative of the possession
of ‘ethical status’ in those humans” (2011: 116)—which he takes to be
“ethical productivity and ethical receptivity” (2011: 117)—his expressions for moral
agents and patients.
2.9.1 Responsibility for Robots
There is broad consensus that accountability, liability, and the rule of law are basic
requirements that must be upheld in the face of new technologies (European Group
on Ethics in Science and New Technologies 2018, 18), but the issue in the case of
robots is how this can be done and how responsibility can be allocated. If the robots
act, will they themselves be responsible, liable, or accountable for their actions? Or
should the distribution of risk perhaps take precedence over discussions of
responsibility?
Traditional distribution of responsibility already occurs: A car maker is responsible
for the technical safety of the car, a driver is responsible for driving, a mechanic is
responsible for proper maintenance, the public authorities are responsible for the
technical conditions of the roads, etc. In general
The effects of decisions or actions based on AI are often the result of countless
interactions among many actors, including designers, developers, users, software,
and hardware.… With distributed agency comes distributed responsibility. (Taddeo
and Floridi 2018: 751).
How this distribution might occur is not a problem that is specific to AI, but it gains
particular urgency in this context (Nyholm 2018a, 2018b). In classical control
engineering, distributed control is often achieved through a control hierarchy plus
control loops across these hierarchies.
2.9.2 Rights for Robots
Some authors have indicated that it should be seriously considered whether current
robots must be allocated rights (Gunkel 2018a, 2018b; Danaher forthcoming; Turner
2019). This position seems to rely largely on criticism of the opponents and on the
empirical observation that robots and other non-persons are sometimes treated as
having rights. In this vein, a “relational turn” has been proposed: If we relate to
robots as though they had rights, then we might be well-advised not to search
whether they “really” do have such rights (Coeckelbergh 2010, 2012, 2018). This
raises the question how far such anti-realism or quasi-realism can go, and what it
means then to say that “robots have rights” in a human-centred approach (Gerdes
2016). On the other side of the debate, Bryson has insisted that robots should not
enjoy rights (Bryson 2010), though she considers it a possibility (Gunkel and Bryson
2014).
There is a wholly separate issue whether robots (or other AI systems) should be
given the status of “legal entities” or “legal persons” in a sense natural persons, but
also states, businesses, or organisations are “entities”, namely they can have legal
rights and duties. The European Parliament has considered allocating such status to
robots in order to deal with civil liability (EU Parliament 2016; Bertolini and Aiello
2018), but not criminal liability—which is reserved for natural persons. It would
also be possible to assign only a certain subset of rights and duties to robots. It has
been said that “such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally
troublesome” because it would not serve the interest of humans (Bryson, Diamantis,
and Grant 2017: 273). In environmental ethics there is a long-standing discussion
about the legal rights for natural objects like trees (C. D. Stone 1972).
It has also been said that the reasons for developing robots with rights, or artificial
moral patients, in the future are ethically doubtful (van Wynsberghe and Robbins
2019). In the community of “artificial consciousness” researchers there is a
significant concern whether it would be ethical to create such consciousness since
creating it would presumably imply ethical obligations to a sentient being, e.g., not
to harm it and not to end its existence by switching it off—some authors have called
for a “moratorium on synthetic phenomenology” (Bentley et al. 2018: 28f).

2.10 Singularity
2.10.1 Singularity and Superintelligence
In some quarters, the aim of current AI is thought to be an “artificial general
intelligence” (AGI), contrasted to a technical or “narrow” AI. AGI is usually
distinguished from traditional notions of AI as a general purpose system, and from
Searle’s notion of “strong AI”:
computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have
other cognitive states. (Searle 1980: 417)
The idea of singularity is that if the trajectory of artificial intelligence reaches up to
systems that have a human level of intelligence, then these systems would
themselves have the ability to develop AI systems that surpass the human level of
intelligence, i.e., they are “superintelligent” (see below). Such superintelligent AI
systems would quickly self-improve or develop even more intelligent systems. This
sharp turn of events after reaching superintelligent AI is the “singularity” from
which the development of AI is out of human control and hard to predict (Kurzweil
2005: 487).
The fear that “the robots we created will take over the world” had captured human
imagination even before there were computers (e.g., Butler 1863) and is the central
theme in Čapek’s famous play that introduced the word “robot” (Čapek 1920). This
fear was first formulated as a possible trajectory of existing AI into an “intelligence
explosion” by Irvin Good:
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the
intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is
one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even
better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”,
and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent
machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is
docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. (Good 1965: 33)
The optimistic argument from acceleration to singularity is spelled out by Kurzweil
(1999, 2005, 2012) who essentially points out that computing power has been
increasing exponentially, i.e., doubling ca. every 2 years since 1970 in accordance
with “Moore’s Law” on the number of transistors, and will continue to do so for
some time in the future. He predicted in (Kurzweil 1999) that by 2010
supercomputers will reach human computation capacity, by 2030 “mind uploading”
will be possible, and by 2045 the “singularity” will occur. Kurzweil talks about an
increase in computing power that can be purchased at a given cost—but of course in
recent years the funds available to AI companies have also increased enormously:
Amodei and Hernandez (2018 [OIR]) thus estimate that in the years 2012–2018 the
actual computing power available to train a particular AI system doubled every 3.4
months, resulting in an 300,000x increase—not the 7x increase that doubling every
two years would have created.
A common version of this argument (Chalmers 2010) talks about an increase in
“intelligence” of the AI system (rather than raw computing power), but the crucial
point of “singularity” remains the one where further development of AI is taken over
by AI systems and accelerates beyond human level. Bostrom (2014) explains in
some detail what would happen at that point and what the risks for humanity are.
The discussion is summarised in Eden et al. (2012); Armstrong (2014); Shanahan
(2015). There are possible paths to superintelligence other than computing power
increase, e.g., the complete emulation of the human brain on a computer (Kurzweil
2012; Sandberg 2013), biological paths, or networks and organisations (Bostrom
2014: 22–51).
Despite obvious weaknesses in the identification of “intelligence” with processing
power, Kurzweil seems right that humans tend to underestimate the power of
exponential growth. Mini-test: If you walked in steps in such a way that each step is
double the previous, starting with a step of one metre, how far would you get with
30 steps? (answer: to Earth’s only permanent natural satellite.) Indeed, most
progress in AI is readily attributable to the availability of processors that are faster
by degrees of magnitude, larger storage, and higher investment (Müller 2018). The
actual acceleration and its speeds are discussed in (Müller and Bostrom 2016;
Bostrom, Dafoe, and Flynn forthcoming); Sandberg (2019) argues that progress will
continue for some time.
The participants in this debate are united by being technophiles in the sense that they
expect technology to develop rapidly and bring broadly welcome changes—but
beyond that, they divide into those who focus on benefits (e.g., Kurzweil) and those
who focus on risks (e.g., Bostrom). Both camps sympathise with “transhuman”
views of survival for humankind in a different physical form, e.g., uploaded on a
computer (Moravec 1990, 1998; Bostrom 2003a, 2003c). They also consider the
prospects of “human enhancement” in various respects, including intelligence—
often called “IA” (intelligence augmentation). It may be that future AI will be used
for human enhancement, or will contribute further to the dissolution of the neatly
defined human single person. Robin Hanson provides detailed speculation about
what will happen economically in case human “brain emulation” enables truly
intelligent robots or “ems” (Hanson 2016).
The argument from superintelligence to risk requires the assumption that
superintelligence does not imply benevolence—contrary to Kantian traditions in
ethics that have argued higher levels of rationality or intelligence would go along
with a better understanding of what is moral and better ability to act morally
(Gewirth 1978; Chalmers 2010: 36f). Arguments for risk from superintelligence say
that rationality and morality are entirely independent dimensions—this is sometimes
explicitly argued for as an “orthogonality thesis” (Bostrom 2012; Armstrong 2013;
Bostrom 2014: 105–109).
Criticism of the singularity narrative has been raised from various angles. Kurzweil
and Bostrom seem to assume that intelligence is a one-dimensional property and that
the set of intelligent agents is totally-ordered in the mathematical sense—but neither
discusses intelligence at any length in their books. Generally, it is fair to say that
despite some efforts, the assumptions made in the powerful narrative of
superintelligence and singularity have not been investigated in detail. One question
is whether such a singularity will ever occur—it may be conceptually impossible,
practically impossible or may just not happen because of contingent events,
including people actively preventing it. Philosophically, the interesting question is
whether singularity is just a “myth” (Floridi 2016; Ganascia 2017), and not on the
trajectory of actual AI research. This is something that practitioners often assume
(e.g., Brooks 2017 [OIR]). They may do so because they fear the public relations
backlash, because they overestimate the practical problems, or because they have
good reasons to think that superintelligence is an unlikely outcome of current AI
research (Müller forthcoming-a). This discussion raises the question whether the
concern about “singularity” is just a narrative about fictional AI based on human
fears. But even if one does find negative reasons compelling and the singularity not
likely to occur, there is still a significant possibility that one may turn out to be
wrong. Philosophy is not on the “secure path of a science” (Kant 1791: B15), and
maybe AI and robotics aren’t either (Müller 2020). So, it appears that discussing the
very high-impact risk of singularity has justification even if one thinks the
probability of such singularity ever occurring is very low.
2.10.2 Existential Risk from Superintelligence
Thinking about superintelligence in the long term raises the question whether
superintelligence may lead to the extinction of the human species, which is called an
“existential risk” (or XRisk): The superintelligent systems may well have
preferences that conflict with the existence of humans on Earth, and may thus decide
to end that existence—and given their superior intelligence, they will have the
power to do so (or they may happen to end it because they do not really care).
Thinking in the long term is the crucial feature of this literature. Whether the
singularity (or another catastrophic event) occurs in 30 or 300 or 3000 years does
not really matter (Baum et al. 2019). Perhaps there is even an astronomical pattern
such that an intelligent species is bound to discover AI at some point, and thus bring
about its own demise. Such a “great filter” would contribute to the explanation of
the “Fermi paradox” why there is no sign of life in the known universe despite the
high probability of it emerging. It would be bad news if we found out that the “great
filter” is ahead of us, rather than an obstacle that Earth has already passed. These
issues are sometimes taken more narrowly to be about human extinction (Bostrom
2013), or more broadly as concerning any large risk for the species (Rees 2018)—of
which AI is only one (Häggström 2016; Ord 2020). Bostrom also uses the category
of “global catastrophic risk” for risks that are sufficiently high up the two
dimensions of “scope” and “severity” (Bostrom and Ćirković 2011; Bostrom 2013).
These discussions of risk are usually not connected to the general problem of ethics
under risk (e.g., Hansson 2013, 2018). The long-term view has its own
methodological challenges but has produced a wide discussion: (Tegmark 2017)
focuses on AI and human life “3.0” after singularity while Russell, Dewey, and
Tegmark (2015) and Bostrom, Dafoe, and Flynn (forthcoming) survey longer-term
policy issues in ethical AI. Several collections of papers have investigated the risks
of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the factors that might make this
development more or less risk-laden (Müller 2016b; Callaghan et al. 2017;
Yampolskiy 2018), including the development of non-agent AI (Drexler 2019).
2.10.3 Controlling Superintelligence?
In a narrow sense, the “control problem” is how we humans can remain in control of
an AI system once it is superintelligent (Bostrom 2014: 127ff). In a wider sense, it is
the problem of how we can make sure an AI system will turn out to be positive
according to human perception (Russell 2019); this is sometimes called “value
alignment”. How easy or hard it is to control a superintelligence depends
significantly on the speed of “take-off” to a superintelligent system. This has led to
particular attention to systems with self-improvement, such as AlphaZero (Silver et
al. 2018).
One aspect of this problem is that we might decide a certain feature is desirable, but
then find out that it has unforeseen consequences that are so negative that we would
not desire that feature after all. This is the ancient problem of King Midas who
wished that all he touched would turn into gold. This problem has been discussed on
the occasion of various examples, such as the “paperclip maximiser” (Bostrom
2003b), or the program to optimise chess performance (Omohundro 2014).
 Discussions about superintelligence include speculation about omniscient beings,
the radical changes on a “latter day”, and the promise of immortality through
transcendence of our current bodily form—so sometimes they have clear religious
undertones (Capurro 1993; Geraci 2008, 2010; O’Connell 2017: 160ff). These issues
also pose a well-known problem of epistemology: Can we know the ways of the
omniscient (Danaher 2015)? The usual opponents have already shown up: A
characteristic response of an atheist is
People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real
problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world
(Domingos 2015)
The new nihilists explain that a “techno-hypnosis” through information technologies
has now become our main method of distraction from the loss of meaning (Gertz
2018). Both opponents would thus say we need an ethics for the “small” problems
that occur with actual AI and robotics (sections 2.1 through 2.9 above), and that
there is less need for the “big ethics” of existential risk from AI (section 2.10).

3. Closing
The singularity thus raises the problem of the concept of AI again. It is remarkable
how imagination or “vision” has played a central role since the very beginning of the
discipline at the “Dartmouth Summer Research Project” (McCarthy et al. 1955
[OIR]; Simon and Newell 1958). And the evaluation of this vision is subject to
dramatic change: In a few decades, we went from the slogans “AI is impossible”
(Dreyfus 1972) and “AI is just automation” (Lighthill 1973) to “AI will solve all
problems” (Kurzweil 1999) and “AI may kill us all” (Bostrom 2014). This created
media attention and public relations efforts, but it also raises the problem of how
much of this “philosophy and ethics of AI” is really about AI rather than about an
imagined technology. As we said at the outset, AI and robotics have raised
fundamental questions about what we should do with these systems, what the
systems themselves should do, and what risks they have in the long term. They also
challenge the human view of humanity as the intelligent and dominant species on
Earth. We have seen issues that have been raised and will have to watch
technological and social developments closely to catch the new issues early on,
develop a philosophical analysis, and learn for traditional problems of philosophy.

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