Why ethical robots might not be such a good idea after all

Last week my colleague Dieter Vanderelst presented our paper: The Dark Side of Ethical Robots at AIES 2018 in New Orleans. I blogged about Dieter's very elegant experiment here, but let me summarise. With two NAO robots he set up a demonstration of an ethical robot helping another robot acting as a proxy human, then showed that with a very simple alteration of the ethical robot's logic it is transformed into a distinctly unethical robot – behaving either competitively or aggressively toward the proxy human. Here are our paper's key conclusions: The ease of transformation from ethical to unethical robot is hardly surprising. It is a straightforward consequence of the fact that both ethical and unethical behaviours require the same cognitive machinery with – in our implementation – only a subtle difference in the way a single value is calculated.