Today, it is difficult to imagine a technology that is as enthralling and terrifying as machine learning. While media coverage and research papers consistently tout the potential of machine learning to become the biggest driver of positive change in business and society, the lingering question on everyone's mind is: "Well, what if it all goes terribly wrong?" For years, experts have warned against the unanticipated effects of general artificial intelligence (AI) on society. Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2029 intelligent machines will be able to outsmart human beings. Stephen Hawking argues that "once humans develop full AI, it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate".

Are robots capable of moral or ethical reasoning? The Office of Naval Research will award $7.5 million in grant money over five years to university researchers from Tufts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brown, Yale and Georgetown to explore how to build a sense of right and wrong and moral consequence into autonomous robotic systems. "Even though today's unmanned systems are'dumb' in comparison to a human counterpart, strides are being made quickly to incorporate more automation at a faster pace than we've seen before," Paul Bello, director of the cognitive science program at the Office of Naval Research told Defense One. "For example, Google's self-driving cars are legal and in-use in several states at this point. As researchers, we are playing catch-up trying to figure out the ethical and legal implications. We do not want to be caught similarly flat-footed in any kind of military domain where lives are at stake."

There has been a sense that as the capabilities of artificial intelligence has expanded at a rapid pace in the past few years that we need to step back and think of the philosophical and ethical side of AI. This is especially so when we have such a patchy understanding of how seemingly straightforward goals might be carried out by an AI. For instance, requesting that an AI eradicate cancer could prompt it to kill all humans, thus achieving its ultimate goal but probably not in the way we'd desire. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology believe that robots can learn sufficient ethics, even if it's not hardwired into them by using an approach they're calling Quixote. The approach, which was documented in a recent paper, uses value alignment, with the robots trained using stories to understand right from wrong.