We are rapidly approaching the day when an autonomous artificial intelligence may have to make ethical decisions of great magnitude without human supervision. The question that we must answer is how it should act when life is on the line. Helping us make our decision is philosopher James H. Moor, one of the first philosophers to make significant inroads into computer ethics. In his 2009 essay Four Kinds of Ethical Robots, he examines the possible ethical responsibilities machines could have and how we ought to think about it. Each group has different ethical abilities that we need to account for when designing and responding to them.

The Case for Explicit Ethical Agents

Machine ethics has a broad range of possible implementations in computer technology--from maintaining detailed records in hospital databases to overseeing emergency team movements after a disaster. From a machine ethics perspective, you can look at machines as ethical-impact agents, implicit ethical agents, explicit ethical agents, or full ethical agents. A current research challenge is to develop machines that are explicit ethical agents. This research is important, but accomplishing this goal will be extremely difficult without a better understanding of ethics and of machine learning and cognition. This article is part of a special issue on Machine Ethics.