Truly Autonomous Machines Are Ethical

John Hooker Carnegie Mellon University Revised December 2018 Abstract While many see the prospect of autonomous machines as threatening, autonomy may be exactly what we want in a superintelligent machine. There is a sense of autonomy, deeply rooted in the ethical literature, in which an autonomous machine is necessarily an ethical one. Development of the theory underlying this idea not only reveals the advantages of autonomy, but it sheds light on a number of issues in the ethics of artificial intelligence. It helps us to understand what sort of obligations we owe to machines, and what obligations they owe to us. It clears up the issue of assigning responsibility to machines or their creators. More generally, a concept of autonomy that is adequate to both human and artificial intelligence can lead to a more adequate ethical theory for both. There is a good deal of trepidation at the prospect of autonomous machines. They may wreak havoc and even turn on their creators. We fear losing control of machines that have minds of their own, particularly if they are intelligent enough to outwit us. There is talk of a "singularity" in technological development, at which point machines will start designing themselves and create superintelligence (Vinge 1993, Bostrom 2014). Do we want such machines to be autonomous? There is a sense of autonomy, deeply rooted in the ethics literature, in which this may be exactly what we want. The attraction of an autonomous machine, in this sense, is that it is an ethical machine. The aim of this paper is to explain why this is so, and to show that the associated theory can shed light on a number of issues in the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI).