Self-driving car developers struggle with such scenarios. MIT’s Moral Machines website asks participants to evaluate various situations to identify the lesser of evils and to assess what humans would want driverless cars to do. The scenarios are all awful: should a driverless car mow down three children in the lane ahead or swerve into the other lane and smash into five adults? Most of us would struggle to identify the best outcome in these scenarios, and if we can’t quickly or easily decide what to do, how can a robot?
If coding morals into robots proves impossible, we may have to teach them, just as we were taught by family, school, church, laws, and, for better and for worse, the media. Of course, there are problems with this scenario too. Recall the debacle surrounding Microsoft’s Tay, a chatbot that joined Twitter in March and within 24 hours espoused racism, sexism, and Nazism, among other nauseating views. It wasn’t programmed with those beliefs—in fact, Microsoft tried to make Tay as noncontroversial as possible, but thanks to interactions on Twitter, Tay learned how to be a bigoted troll.
Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have expressed concern over AI’s potential to escape our control. It might seem that a sense of morals would help prevent this, but that’s not necessarily true. What if, as in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.—the first story to use the word “robot”—robots find their enslavement not just unpleasant but wrong, and thus seek revenge on their immoral human creators?
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