Using Stories To Teach Robots Right From Wrong - DZone Big Data

There has been a sense that as the capabilities of artificial intelligence has expanded at a rapid pace in the past few years that we need to step back and think of the philosophical and ethical side of AI. This is especially so when we have such a patchy understanding of how seemingly straightforward goals might be carried out by an AI. For instance, requesting that an AI eradicate cancer could prompt it to kill all humans, thus achieving its ultimate goal but probably not in the way we'd desire. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology believe that robots can learn sufficient ethics, even if it's not hardwired into them by using an approach they're calling Quixote. The approach, which was documented in a recent paper, uses value alignment, with the robots trained using stories to understand right from wrong.