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In our continuing series on the basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence, today we take a closer look at'expert systems,' a somewhat (but not entirely) obsolete branch of symbolic AI. For a long time, expert systems were the most promising, highest-hyped products of AI research. But both the philosophical attacks by Dreyfus, Winograd and others, as well as a lingering sense of the failure of expert systems to deliver on their promises contributed to the 80's disillusionment with AI -- what has since been dubbed the "AI winter," and that ended only with the advent of deep learning in the early 2010s. Expert systems are rule-based inference machines for particular domains of knowledge. They are intended to replace "experts" in that domain.

Moral reasoning is being modeled for robots, since they are expected to play an increasingly critical role in making judgment calls where human lives are at stake. With robots expected to play an increasingly critical role in making judgment calls where human lives are at stake, it is imperative to model moral reasoning in machines. "Right now the major challenge for even thinking about how robots might be able to understand moral norms is that we don't understand on the human side how humans represent and reason if possible with moral norms," notes Tufts University researcher Matthias Scheutz. Social psychologists at Brown University have started accumulating a list of words, concepts, and rules people use to discuss morality, and then they must determine how to quantify this vocabulary. The hypothesis of Brown's Bertram Malle is the human moral landscape might resemble a semantic network, in which a subset of norms is triggered in a specific context and becomes available to direct action, identify violations, and enable humans to make judgments.

Whether it's in our cars, our hospitals or our homes, we'll soon depend upon robots to make judgement calls in which human lives are at stake. That's why a team of researchers is attempting to model moral reasoning in a robot. In order to pull it off, they'll need to answer some important questions: How can we quantify the fuzzy, conflicting norms that guide human choices? How can we equip robots with the communication skills to explain their choices in way that we can understand? And would we even want robots to make the same decisions we'd expect humans to make?