The scientific community is observing the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the existential questions it has brought along with it. Fears about whether robots could act unethically and choose to harm humans is a major rallying point for bans on robotics research. To assuage these concerns, some researchers are asking whether we can teach AIs ethical behavior instead. This is difficult, however, because there is no user manual for being human and moral. Researchers Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison from the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology believe that the answer may lie in "Quixote".

However, the project to merge social science and artificial intelligence ran into more than a few bumps in the road. In a 1990 book, sociologist Harry Collins suggests why. Collins argued that every community "knows" certain tacit things that are difficult if not impossible to fully represent computationally. Or, in other words, "computers can act intelligently to the degree that humans act mechanically." Lots of human activities (like voting, greeting, praying, shopping, or writing a love letter) are "polymorphic"--socially shaped based on an understanding of how society expects the action to be performed.