Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong [Hardcover]

Wendell Wallach (Author), Colin Allen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 19, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0195374045 | ISBN-13: 978-0195374049

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An invaluable guide to avoiding the stuff of science-fiction nightmares."--John Gilby, Times Higher Education

"Moral Machines is a fine introduction to the emerging field of robot ethics. There is much here that will interest ethicists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and roboticists."--Peter Danielson, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"Written with an abundance of examples and lessons learned, scenarios of incidents that may happen, and elaborate discussions on existing artificial agents on the cutting edge of research/practice, Moral Machines goes beyond what is known as computer ethics into what will soon be called the discipline of machine morality. Highly recommended."--G. Trajkovski, CHOICE

"the book does succeed in making the essential point that the phrase 'moral machine' is not an oxymoron. It also provides a window onto an area of research with which psychologists are unlikely to be familiar and one from which, at some point, we may be able to learn quite a lot."--PsycCRITIQUES

"In a single, thought-provoking volume, the authors not only introduce machine ethics, but also an inquiry that penetrates to the deepest foundations of ethics. The conscientious reader will, no doubt, find many challenging ideas here that will require a reassessment of her own beliefs, making this text a "must read" among recent books in philosophy and, more specifically, applied ethics."--Tony Beavers, Ethics and Information Technology

About the Author

Wendell Wallach is a consultant and writer and is affiliated with Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics.

Colin Allen is a Professor of History & Philosophy of Science and of Cognitive Science at Indiana University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 19, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195374045
• ISBN-13: 978-0195374049
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,091,822 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #90 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Computer Mathematics

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best robot ethics text yet, December 19, 2008

By 

Keith A. Abney (San Luis Obispo, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong (Hardcover)

Allen and Wallach's Moral Machines is the best text yet in the rapidly expanding field of robot ethics - and their work offers insight into the morals of not only robots, but ourselves as well.

Wallach and Allen examine the strengths and limitations of traditional approaches to ethics, such as deontology and utilitarianism, and the issues that arise in attempting a top-down programming of such rules into a robot. But the history of ethics is replete with controversy over the adequacy of any proposed set of rules - for instance, it might seem logical to switch the track of a runaway trolley that would kill five workers, even if it would thereby kill one person on the other track - switching maximizes utility. But should a doctor then harvest organs from a patient in for a checkup to save five people in the next room needing transplants?

So what should a robot do? An alternative is to attempt a 'bottom up' approach, and teach ethics to robots by trial and error, as we do children. The authors argue that this approach has both technical and rational limitations as well; principles are especially useful in resolving the difficult moral situations we call moral dilemmas. So they argue that a hybrid approach is probably best, and discuss in thought-provoking ways whether robots would need emotions, and how human-like we should desire these robotic agents to be.

Wallach and Allen convincingly argue that even if full moral agency for machines is a long way off, it is already necessary to start instilling into robots a type of functional morality, as robots are already engaged in high-risk situations and are already equipped with lethal weapons (e.g., the Predator drones now flying in Pakistan).

The text is anchored in near-term considerations and hence is light on some of the more far-reaching aspects of robot ethics - for instance, if full human-type ('Kantian') autonomy for robots is possible, should it be allowed? Or should robots be forever relegated to a 'slave morality', so they could never ultimately choose their own life's goals - lest they be harmful to humans? But the failure to engage in these more long-term debates simply underlines the near-term strengths of this text. For those wondering (or worried) about moral questions involving robots over the next decade, this is a must-read.

P.S. They also have a nice blog with updates: [...]

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Limited imaginations, December 27, 2009

By 

Peter McCluskey (San Bruno, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong (Hardcover)

This book combines the ideas of leading commentators on ethics, methods of implementing AI, and the risks of AI, into a set of ideas on how machines ought to achieve ethical behavior.

The book mostly provides an accurate survey of what those commentators agree and disagree about. But there's enough disagreement that we need some insights into which views are correct (especially about theories of ethics) in order to produce useful advice to AI designers, and the authors don't have those kinds of insights.

The book focuses more on near term risks of software that is much less intelligent than humans, and is complacent about the risks of superhuman AI.

The implications of superhuman AIs for theories of ethics ought to illuminate flaws in them that aren't obvious when considering purely human-level intelligence. For example, they mention an argument that any AI would value humans for their diversity of ideas, which would help AIs to search the space of possible ideas. This seems to have serious problems, such as what stops an AI from fiddling with human minds to increase their diversity? Yet the authors are too focused on human-like minds to imagine an intelligence which would do that.

Their discussion of the advocates friendly AI seems a bit confused. The authors wonder if those advocates are trying to quell apprehension about AI risks, when I've observed pretty consistent efforts by those advocates to create apprehension among AI researchers.

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book for teaching, July 12, 2011

By 

Chris Santos-Lang - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong (Hardcover)

Although this book is accessible to a popular audience, it has obvious academic merit. The authors thoroughly search-out all perspectives in this new field (i.e. it has a huge bibliography) and treat each perspective with skillful fairness. It both establishes itself as the authoritative reference, framing the issues for the new field of machine ethics, and establishes the credibility of the field as an academic pursuit. Good libraries ought to have this book.

This book was not intended as an introduction to ethics, but it is the book I would be inclined to assign as an ethics textbook. It covers an introduction to ethics, of course, but also covers material in related disciplines (psychology, economics, etc.), and gets technical about where our society assumes ethical faculties. It forces the reader to think about how ethics work, rather than just express opinions about contemporary moral issues, and is probably the very best book in existence for giving readers an appreciation for the ways the field of ethics will have to grow in the near future.