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Ethical Decision Making in Robots: Autonomy, Trust and Responsibility

Autonomy Trust and Responsibility

  • Conference paper
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Social Robotics (ICSR 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9979))

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Abstract

Autonomous robots such as self-driving cars are already able to make decisions that have ethical consequences. As such machines make increasingly complex and important decisions, we will need to know that their decisions are trustworthy and ethically justified. Hence we will need them to be able to explain the reasons for these decisions: ethical decision-making requires that decisions be explainable with reasons. We argue that for people to trust autonomous robots we need to know which ethical principles they are applying and that their application is deterministic and predictable. If a robot is a self-improving, self-learning type of robot whose choices and decisions are based on past experience, which decision it makes in any given situation may not be entirely predictable ahead of time or explainable after the fact. This combination of non-predictability and autonomy may confer a greater degree of responsibility to the machine but it also makes them harder to trust.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

    André Vellino

  2. Electronic Business Technologies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

    Fahad Alaieri

  3. Management Information Systems, Qassim University, Buraydah, Saudi Arabia

    Fahad Alaieri

Authors
  1. Fahad Alaieri
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  2. André Vellino
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to André Vellino .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Indiana, USA

    Arvin Agah

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

    John-John Cabibihan

  3. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

    Ayanna M. Howard

  4. Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, University Carlos III de Madrid, madrid, Spain

    Miguel A. Salichs

  5. Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

    Hongsheng He

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Alaieri, F., Vellino, A. (2016). Ethical Decision Making in Robots: Autonomy, Trust and Responsibility. In: Agah, A., Cabibihan, JJ., Howard, A., Salichs, M., He, H. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9979. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47436-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47437-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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