The Case for Outsourcing Morality to AI

It all started with an obscure article in an obscure journal, published just as the last AI winter was beginning to thaw. In 2004, Andreas Matthias wrote an article with the enigmatic title, "The responsibility gap: Ascribing responsibility for the actions of learning automata." In it, he highlighted a new problem with modern AI systems based on machine learning principles. Once, it made sense to hold the manufacturer or operator of a machine responsible if the machine caused harm, but with the advent of machines that could learn from their interactions with the world, this practice made less sense. Learning automata (to use Matthias' terminology) could do things that were neither predictable nor reasonably foreseeable by their human overseers.