The limits of artificial ethics

Logicians have long known that some surprisingly simple tasks have no algorithmic solutions. That is, not everything is computable. This fact seems lost on artificial intelligence pundits who happily imagine a world of robots without limits. The assumption that self-driving cars for instance will be able to deal automatically and ethically with life-and-death situations goes unexamined in the public discourse. If algorithms have critical limits, then the tacit assumption that ethics will be automated is itself unethical.