In philosophy of mind, zombies are imaginary creatures that are exact physical duplicates of conscious subjects but for whom there is no first-personal experience. Zombies are meant to show that physicalism—the theory that the universe is made up entirely out of physical components—is false. In this paper, I apply the zombie thought experiment to the realm of morality to assess whether moral agency is something independent from sentience. Algorithms, I argue, are a kind of functional moral zombie, such that thinking (...) about the latter can help us better understand and regulate the former. I contend that the main reason why algorithms can be neither autonomous nor accountable is that they lack sentience. Moral zombies and algorithms are incoherent as moral agents because they lack the necessary moral understanding to be morally responsible. To understand what it means to inflict pain on someone, it is necessary to have experiential knowledge of pain. At most, for an algorithm that feels nothing, ‘values’ will be items on a list, possibly prioritised in a certain way according to a number that represents weightiness. But entities that do not feel cannot value, and beings that do not value cannot act for moral reasons. (shrink)

Organizations such as the EU High-Level Expert Group on AI and the IEEE have recently formulated ethical principles and values that should be adhered to in the design and deployment of artificial intelligence. These include respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, fairness, transparency, explainability, and accountability. But how can we ensure and verify that an AI system actually respects these values? To help answer this question, I propose an account for determining when an AI system can be said to embody certain values. (...) This account understands embodied values as the result of design activities intended to embed those values in such systems. AI systems are here understood as a special kind of sociotechnical system that, like traditional sociotechnical systems, are composed of technical artifacts, human agents, and institutions but—in addition—contain artificial agents and certain technical norms that regulate interactions between artificial agents and other elements of the system. The specific challenges and opportunities of embedding values in AI systems are discussed, and some lessons for better embedding values in AI systems are drawn. (shrink)

Social robotics are autonomous robots or Artificial Moral Agents, that will interact respect and embody human ethical values. However, the conceptual and practical problems of building such systems have not yet been resolved, playing a role of significant challenge for computational modeling. It seems that the lack of success in constructing robots, ceteris paribus, is due to the conceptual and algorithmic limitations of the current design of ethical robots. This paper proposes a new approach for developing ethical capacities in robotic (...) systems, one based on the concept of Aristotelian phronesis. Phronesis in principle reflexes closer human ethics than the ethical paradigms we employ today in ethical robotics. This paper describes the essential features of phronesis and proposes a high-level architecture for implementing phronetic principles in autonomous robots. Phronetic robotics is in its early stages of conceptualization, so many of the presented ideas are speculative and require further research.2. (shrink)