Can an Intelligent Robot Be Able to Have Ethical Features?

Abstract

Ethical issues in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) have been widely discussed in recent years, not only in the philosophical, but in the scientific liter­ature. This is largely due to the fear of obvious risks and threats that the growing digitalization causes in almost all areas of social life. Ethical research of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies becomes extremely relevant in the context of cre­ating a general AI system, that is, a human-level agent. This task seems difficult since ethics cannot present to engineers a normative system in the form of a cer­tain hierarchical architecture for its computational implementation. In this re­gard, authors of this article see an opportunity to avoid this uncertainty in de­signing an autonomous system of general AI by constructing particular models based on the classifier of activities. This will allow one to algorithmize the nec­essary ethical functions. There are two circumstances that need to be taken into account in further studies of artificial moral agency: (1) the continuality of any algorithmic model of an ethical system and (2) the effectiveness of the “reinforce­ment learning” method in modeling a situation of uncertainty and the mechanism of physiological pain as one of the factors in the formation of moral behavior.