The Conscience of a Machine? Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Moral Responsibility

Abstract

The ever-accelerating progress in the area of smart technologies gives rise to new ethical challenges, which humankind will sooner or later have to face. An inevitable component of this progress is the increase in the autonomy of the decision-making processes carried out by machines and systems functioning without direct human control. At least some of these decisions will generate conflicts and moral dilemmas. It is therefore worth the while to reflect today upon the measures that need to be taken in order to endow the autonomous, self-learning and self-replicating entities – products equipped with artificial intelligence and capable of independent operation in a wide variety of external conditions and circumstances – with a unique kind of ethical intelligence. At the core of the problem, which both the designers and the users of entities bestowed with artificial intelligence must eventually face, lies the question of how to attain the optimal balance between the goals, needs and interests of both sides of the human-non-human interaction. It is so, because in the context of the expansion of the autonomy of the machines, the anthropocentric model of ethics does no longer suffice. It is therefore necessary to develop a new, extended and modified, model of ethics: a model which would encompass the whole, thus far non-existent, area of equal relations between the human and the machine, and which would allow one to predict its dynamics. The present article addresses some of the aspects of this claim.