Moral Machines

Google’s driver-less cars are already street-legal in three states, California, Florida, and Nevada, and some day similar devices may not just be possible but mandatory. Eventually (though not yet) automated vehicles will be able to drive better, and more safely than you can; no drinking, no distraction, better reflexes, and better awareness (via networking) of other vehicles. Within two or three decades the difference between automated driving and human driving will be so great you may not be legally allowed to drive your own car, and even if you are allowed, it would be immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work.

That moment will be significant not just because it will signal the end of one more human niche, but because it will signal the beginning of another: the era in which it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems. Your car is speeding along a bridge at fifty miles per hour when errant school bus carrying forty innocent children crosses its path. Should your car swerve, possibly risking the life of its owner (you), in order to save the children, or keep going, putting all forty kids at risk? If the decision must be made in milliseconds, the computer will have to make the call. (...)

With or without robotic soldiers, what we really need is a sound way to teach our machines to be ethical. The trouble is that we have almost no idea how to do that. Many discussions start with three famous laws from Isaac Asimov:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws.

The trouble with these seemingly sound laws is threefold. The first is technical: at least for now, we couldn’t program a machine with Asimov’s laws if we tried. As yet, we haven’t figured out how to build a machine that fully comprehends the concept of “dinner”, much less something as abstract as “harm” or “protection.” Likewise, we are a long way from constructing a robot that can fully anticipate the consequences of any of its actions (or inactions). For now, a robot is lucky if it can predict would happen if it dropped a glass of water. A.I. has a long way to go before laws as abstract as Asimov’s could realistically be encoded in software.

Second, even if we could figure out how to do the programming, the rules might be too restrictive. The first and second laws, for example, preclude robots from ever harming other humans, but most people would make exceptions for robots that could eliminate potential human targets that were a clear and present danger to others. Only a true ideologue would want to stop a robotic sniper from taking down a hostage-taker or Columbine killer.

Meanwhile, Asimov’s laws themselves might not be fair—to robots. As the computer scientist Kevin Korb has pointed out, Asimov’s laws effectively treat robots like slaves. Perhaps that is acceptable for now, but it could become morally questionable (and more difficult to enforce) as machines become smarter and possibly more self-aware.

The laws of Asimov are hardly the only approach to machine ethics, but many others are equally fraught. An all-powerful computer that was programmed to maximize human pleasure, for example, might consign us all to an intravenous dopamine drip; an automated car that aimed to minimize harm would never leave the driveway. Almost any easy solution that one might imagine leads to some variation or another on the Sorceror’s Apprentice, a genie that’s given us what we’ve asked for, rather than what we truly desire. A tiny cadre of brave-hearted souls at Oxford, Yale, and the Berkeley California Singularity Institute are working on these problems, but the annual amount of money being spent on developing machine morality is tiny
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by Gary Marcus, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty.