Artificial Morality
Artificial morality is a research program for the construction of moral machines that is intended to advance the study of computational ethical mechanisms. The name is an intentional analogy to artificial intelligence (AI). Cognitive science has benefited from the attempt to implement intelligence in computational systems; it is hoped that moral science can be informed by building computational models of ethical mechanisms, agents, and environments. As in the case of AI, project goals range from the theoretical aim of using computer models to understand morality mechanistically to the practical aim of building better programs. Also in parallel with AI, artificial morality can adopt either an engineering or a scientific approach.
History
Modern philosophical speculation about moral mechanisms has roots in the work of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). More recently, speculation about ways to implement moral behavior in computers extends back to Isaac Asimov's influential three laws of robotics (1950) and pioneer cyberneticist Warren McCulloch's 1965 sketch of levels of motivation in games. On the lighter side, Michael Frayn's The Tin Men (1965) is a parody of artificial morality that features an experimental test of altruism involving robots in life rafts. Although there has been fairly extensive work in this field broadly considered, it is an immature research area; a recent article calls itself a "Prolegomena" (Allen, Varner, and Zinser 2000).
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