The Good, The Bad and The Robot: Experts Are Trying to Make Machines Be "Moral"

Human beings begin to learn the difference before we learn to speak--and thankfully so. We owe much of our success as a species to our capacity for moral reasoning. It's the glue that holds human social groups together, the key to our fraught but effective ability to cooperate. We are (most believe) the lone moral agents on planet Earth--but this may not last. The day may come soon when we are forced to share this status with a new kind of being, one whose intelligence is of our own design. Robots are coming, that much is sure. They are coming to our streets as self-driving cars, to our military as automated drones, to our homes as elder-care robots--and that's just to name a few on the horizon (Ten million households already enjoy cleaner floors thanks to a relatively dumb little robot called the Roomba). What we don't know is how smart they will eventually become. Some believe human-level artificial intelligence is pure science fiction; others believe they will far surpass us in intelligence--and sooner rather than later.