Ethics by Design: Necessity or Curse?

in Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society AIES 2018, New Orleans, LA, USA, February 02-03, 2018 (2018)

Ethics by Design concerns the methods, algorithms and tools needed to endow autonomous agents with the capability to reason about the ethical aspects of their decisions, and the methods, tools and ... [more ▼]

Ethics by Design concerns the methods, algorithms and tools needed to endow autonomous agents with the capability to reason about the ethical aspects of their decisions, and the methods, tools and formalisms to guarantee that an agent's behavior remains within given moral bounds. In this context some questions arise: How and to what extent can agents understand the social reality in which they operate, and the other intelligences (AI, animals and humans) with which they co-exist? What are the ethical concerns in the emerging new forms of society, and how do we ensure the human dimension is upheld in interactions and decisions by autonomous agents?. But overall, the central question is: "Can we, and should we, build ethically-aware agents?" This paper presents initial conclusions from the thematic day of the same name held at PRIMA2017, on October 2017. [less ▲]