Colloquium Artificial Intelligence - Prof. Beishui Liao, Zhejiang University

Title: The Philosophical Foundation, Basic Characteristics and Methodologies of Machine Ethics

Abstract:

With the continuous progress of the autonomous decision-making ability of artificial intelligent systems, how to endow intelligent agents with sufficient ethical considerations in decision-making has become an important challenge that has attracted widespread attention. The key approach to solving this problem is to establish machine ethics, which embeds human ethical values and moral norms into artificial intelligent systems, enabling them to have ethical alignment capability. Machine ethics is based on human ethics but has different fundamental characteristics. First, current intelligent machines lack agency and experience in the sense of realism, manifesting as weak agency in ethical decision- making. Second, the decisions of machines should reflect the ethical considerations of human stakeholders affected by their actions, so the ethical decision-making of machines needs to balance the values of different stakeholders, i.e., machines should have social balancing capability. Third, machines are easily influenced by cultural factors in ethical decision-making and should be able to reflect cultural differences. Finally, machines need to explain ethical decisions to human agents, understand emotional expressions, and perform responsibility attribution, thus good human-machine interaction is required. In this talk, I will introduce philosophical foundation and basic characteristics of machine ethics, as well as three kinds of approaches to implementing machine ethics, including knowledge-driven approaches, data-driven approaches and hybrid approaches. More specifically, the explainable AI methods based on norms, argumentation and inductive logic programming will be introduced. Finally, I will discuss problems and prospects.