Regulating artificial intelligence and robotics: ethics by design in a digital society

ABSTRACT

Evidence-based policymaking must urgently consider regulations addressing advances made in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, as well as issues of ownership, management and control. Many repetitive manufacturing tasks once requiring human labour have already been replaced by robots. The general public are facing associated risks to safety and privacy with the appearance of drones, driverless cars, robots of care, and human repair and enhancement. Major challenges for policymakers arise as machines acquire the ability to learn and become autonomous in their decision making. When independent of the humans that created them, their true ‘intelligence’ is tested in terms of their status as ‘moral beings’. Given their algorithmic decision making, questions arise about how ‘they’ could make ethical decisions about their actions and interactions with humans. This paper reviews current issues raised about the morality of autonomous learning machines and explores whether policy can be developed to address their potential to acquire a moral status. The authors argue that policies and regulations will fail if no account is taken of the ethics of robotics, either to ensure an ‘ethics by design’ or prevent them from becoming ‘autonomous moral agents’.

KEYWORDS:

• Robotics
• artificial intelligence
• policymaking
• ethics
• regulation
• algorithms

Acknowledgements

No external funding was sought or provided to prepare this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ron Iphofen

Ron Iphofen FAcSS, is an Independent Research Consultant and advisor to the European Research Council and the European Commission Ethics Unit in the Directorate General for Science and Innovation and to a range of other governmental and independent research agencies across Europe. His background is in medical sociology with a special interest in research ethics and social science methodology. He was formerly Director of Postgraduate Studies in the School of Healthcare Sciences, Bangor University. He publishes widely on research ethics and scientific integrity.

Mihalis Kritikos

Mihalis Kritikos is a Policy Analyst at the European Parliament working as a legal/ethics advisor on Science and Technology issues (STOA/EPRS), and Fellow of the Law Science Technology & Society Programme of the University of Brussels (VUB-LSTS). He is a legal expert in the fields of EU decision-making, legal backcasting, food/environmental law, the responsible governance of science and innovation, and the regulatory control of new and emerging risks. He was a Research Programme Manager for the Ethics Review Service of the European Commission and has lectured at several UK Universities.