The Virtuous Machine - Old Ethics for New Technology?
This addresses ethical challenges in autonomous systems for fields like robotics and AI, but it is incremental as it applies existing ethical frameworks to new technology.
The paper tackles the problem of building moral machines by proposing to integrate Aristotelian virtue ethics into AI, arguing that imitation learning from moral exemplars can solve value alignment and that virtues like temperance and friendship prevent control issues.
Modern AI and robotic systems are characterized by a high and ever-increasing level of autonomy. At the same time, their applications in fields such as autonomous driving, service robotics and digital personal assistants move closer to humans. From the combination of both developments emerges the field of AI ethics which recognizes that the actions of autonomous machines entail moral dimensions and tries to answer the question of how we can build moral machines. In this paper we argue for taking inspiration from Aristotelian virtue ethics by showing that it forms a suitable combination with modern AI due to its focus on learning from experience. We furthermore propose that imitation learning from moral exemplars, a central concept in virtue ethics, can solve the value alignment problem. Finally, we show that an intelligent system endowed with the virtues of temperance and friendship to humans would not pose a control problem as it would not have the desire for limitless self-improvement.