Can We Teach Robots Ethics?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 12 October 2017
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From driverless cars to "carebots", machines are entering the realm of right and wrong. Should an autonomous vehicle prioritise the lives of its passengers over pedestrians? Should a robot caring for an elderly woman respect her right to life ahead of her right to make her own decisions? And who gets to decide? The challenges facing artificial intelligence are not just technical, but moral - and raise hard questions about what it means to be human.
(image: PaPeRo communication robot at the Robodex trade show in Tokyo, Japan, 18 January 2017. Photo credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Inquiry Podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:04.1 | Each week we bring you four expert witnesses answering one pressingling down the track. The brakes have failed. Disaster lies ahead. Five people are tied to the track. If you do nothing, they'll all be killed. But |
| 0:28.0 | you can flick the points and redirect the train down a sidetrack so saving the five the bad news is there's one person on |
| 0:37.0 | that sidetrack and the train will kill him what should you do? It's a classic ethical dilemma in philosophy, but it's now puzzling people |
| 0:49.2 | working in artificial intelligence. If you struggle to answer the question, how would you want a robot |
| 0:55.6 | to respond? I'm David Edmonds and in this inquiry we're asking, can we teach robots ethics. |
| 1:04.0 | Part one, decisions, |
| 1:08.0 | decisions, decisions. |
| 1:13.0 | Right now, in my house I have a writing project going on on the third floor where my office is. |
| 1:20.0 | And in my basement I have a stained glass window project and I go back and forth between the two. |
| 1:28.0 | On the face of it, they're an unusual mix of interests, |
| 1:31.0 | building stained glass windows and writing about machine ethics, but maybe not so different. |
| 1:38.0 | You come up with a creative idea, you try and figure out how to execute it and you work through a problem after problem to make |
| 1:46.0 | sure everything fits together. |
| 1:48.6 | When not working on stained glass, Wendell Wallach teaches technology and ethics at Yale. |
| 1:54.0 | That involves reflecting on weird puzzles involving runaway trains like the one I mentioned earlier. |
| 2:00.0 | Studies show that most people would switch tracks saving five lives even though another life would be lost as a result. |
| 2:08.0 | After all, better five people live than just one. |
| 2:12.0 | Except another version of the puzzle. people live than just one. |
| 2:13.0 | Except another version of the puzzle suggests it's not that simple. |
| 2:18.0 | You're on a drawbridge that is over the tracks. |
| 2:21.5 | OK, pay close attention now. This time you'll stand. the run away |
... |
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