Potential Countermeasures to Ethical Risks and Challenges

There are two main approaches to addressing the ethical concerns around robotics and AI (Torresen, 2018):

Approach 1:

The first approach tasks engineers developing AI systems and intelligent robots to be aware of the possible ethical pitfalls of AI technology, including the potential of misuse, and they should consider these when developing algorithms. Furthermore, this calls for developing mechanisms for transparency, enabling human inspection of algorithms. This concern falls in the roboethics (or robot ethics) understood as the human ethics of those who design, manufacture and use robots.

Approach 2

The second approach falls squarely in the new field of machine ethics, which is: “concerned with giving machines ethical principles or a procedure for discovering a way to resolve the ethical dilemmas they might encounter, enabling them to function in an ethically responsible manner through their own ethical decision making” (Anderson & Anderson, 2011:1 quoted in UNESCO, 2017:43). The field of machine ethics is concerned largely with the question of how to “programme robots with ethical procedures, rules or codes” (UNESCO, 2017:37).