How Can We Trust a Robot?

Across moral and non-moral domains, humans improve their expertise by learning from personal experience, by learning from being told, and by observing the outcomes when others face similar decisions. Children start with little experience and a small number of simple rules they have been taught by parents and teachers. Over time, they accumulate a richer and more nuanced understanding of when particular actions are right or wrong. The complexity of the world suggests the only way to acquire adequately complex decision criteria is through learning. Robots, however, are manufactured artifacts, whose computational state can be stored, copied, and retrieved. Even if mature moral and ethical expertise can only be created through experience and observation, it is conceivable this expertise can then be copied from one robot to another sufficiently similar one, unlike what is possible for humans.