hi my name is john zoshak and we're going to talk
about ethical theories and how they're being used in artificial moral agents
so why are we interested in this at all well it's a live topic of debate it's happening today
self-driving cars are on our streets elder care robots are taking care of the elderly
and there are autonomous weapons systems deployed around the world and so this isn't a hypothetical
topic for when general ai is developed, this is you know a live topic of debate happening
in the world today, and so we were specifically interested in how ethical theories are being
leveraged in ama development and so we use this term ama or artificial moral agent
because the terminology and the literature is kind of all over the place and we thought this term
best described all of the phenomena we were seeing in the papers that we included in our corpus,
so we did a systematic literature review, we go into more detail into the methods in our paper
but we drew heavily from disalvo's methodology from their 2010 paper
and so our final corpus was 53 papers the majority of those papers, as far as what kind
of papers they were, were implementations so they were looking at implementing
an ethical theory into an ama 15 were analysis and four were empirical studies and then the vast
majority of papers explored ethical theories in deontology and consequentialism and so
i don't have a ton of time to go into the specifics of deontology and consequentialism
but suffice it to say for this presentation that deontology focuses on rules and consequentialism
focuses on consequences so deontology is: hitting is bad whereas consequentialism is
hitting is bad because it causes pain and pain is a negative consequence and so the vast majority
of papers in our corpus were discussing ethical theories that foregrounded rules and consequences
and only 10 papers explored other ethical theories so existentialism was represented confucianism,
virtue ethics and hawaiian and lakota theories of ethics and so we think this leads to a couple
interesting takeaways or discussion points the first is you know what frames of analysis are
we missing when we only focus on deontology and consequentialism? so i think of confucianism here,
so confucianism focuses on roles and relationships and so it asks questions in this context like
what kind of person is a human becoming when they interact with an ama? or what does a good human
ama relationship look like? and so these are questions that aren't really asked or centered
in deontology and consequentialism and i think what other questions or frames of analysis are
we missing with the dominance of deontology and consequentialism in the field today?
the other argument that we go into more detail on the paper and i'm not sure i can do it total
justice in 30 seconds but it takes [Bruno] LaTour's ideas of scripts and how scripts
shape and constrain human behavior and how ethical theories are culturally and historically situated
and how we're running the risk of embedding western cultural scripts in AMAs that shape
and constrain human behavior at scale around the world and so i think the non-technical term for
this would be icky and i think the technical term for this would be post-colonial power
structures that need to be interrogated and i think hci is well equipped to examine this
and to also ensure that a greater diversity of ethical theories are informing AMA development
and so when i think about this i think you know feminist care ethics wasn't represented
in our corpus you know there was only four papers that examined virtue ethics and i think we have
a ways to go here in terms of increasing the variety of ethical theories that are informing
AMA development and there's also more room for empirical studies only four papers
were empirical studies in our corpus and the interesting thing here there was a paper on
rebukes and and how an ama might rebuke the human working with it in terms of an
unethical command and it looked at confucian rebukes versus deontological rebukes and i
think this would be a really interesting paper to explore with other ethical theories like what does
an existentialist rebuke look like? what does a feminist care ethics rebuke look like? and i think
you know there's enough in the literature to kind of light the way on more of these studies
but they just need to be done, and so if you take nothing else away from this paper just know that
there are two, err more than two ethical theories that have normative impulses and
can be leveraged and we need more empirical studies and with that i will take questions.