How to teach an artificial brain to understand right and wrong

Movies like I, Robot, Wall-e and Bicentennial Man pose interesting questions that blur lines between man and machines. Now that we step forward into the "cognitive era" with machines capable of thinking and taking decisions just like humans, the question of what should be the guiding star for our actions is gaining a newfound importance. This is yet another issue that we must contend with, and that is – we must decide as to not only which ethical principles must be encoded into our man-made machines to think like us, but also how to encode these ethics. While for the most part, "Thou shalt not kill" remains a cornerstone of a principle for coding intelligence in AI.