Is it dangerous to recreate flawed human morality in machines?

At the Institute of Cognitive Science at Osnabrück University, Germany, virtual reality has become a training ground for machine morality. Leon René Sütfeld, a Ph.D. student in cognitive science, studies human responses to danger and obstacles in traffic scenarios, using this data to train and evaluate decision-making models for algorithms. The need for ethical machines may be one of the defining issues of our time. Algorithms are created to govern critical systems in our society, from banking to medicine, but with no concept of right and wrong, machines cannot understand the repercussions of their actions. A machine has never thrown a punch in a schoolyard fight, cheated on a test or a relationship, or been rapt with the special kind of self-doubt that funds our cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries.