Computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, and driving trains. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach argue that as robots take on more and more responsibility, they must be programmed with moral decision-making abilities, for our own safety. Taking a fast paced tour through the latest thinking about philosophical ethics and artificial intelligence, the authors argue (...) that even if full moral agency for machines is a long way off, it is already necessary to start building a kind of functional morality, in which artificial moral agents have some basic ethical sensitivity. But the standard ethical theories don't seem adequate, and more socially engaged and engaging robots will be needed. As the authors show, the quest to build machines that are capable of telling right from wrong has begun. -/- Moral Machines is the first book to examine the challenge of building artificial moral agents, probing deeply into the nature of human decision making and ethics. (shrink)

The study of the ethical issues related to computer use developed primarily in the 1980s, although a number of important papers were published in previous decades, many of which are contained in this volume. Computer ethics, as the field became known, flourished in the following decades. The emphasis initially was more on the computing profession: on questions related to the development of systems, the behaviour of computing professionals and so on. Later the focus moved to the Internet and to users (...) of computer and related communication technologies. This book reflects these different emphases and has articles on most of the important issues, organised into sections on the history and nature of computer ethics, cyberspace, values and technology, responsibility and professionalism, privacy and surveillance, what computers should not do and morality and machines. (shrink)