There is no right answer to the trolley hypothetical — and even if there was, many roboticists believe it would be impractical to predict each scenario and program what the robot should do.
“It’s almost impossible to devise a complex system of ‘if, then, else’ rules that cover all possible situations,” says Matthias Scheutz, a computer science professor at Tufts University. “That’s why this is such a hard problem. You cannot just list all the circumstances and all the actions.”
Instead, Scheutz is trying to design robot brains that can reason through a moral decision the way a human would. His team, which recently received a$7.5 million grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), is planning an in-depth survey to analyze what people think about when they make a moral choice. The researchers will then attempt to simulate that reasoning in a robot.
At the end of the five-year project, the scientists must present a demonstration of a robot making a moral decision. One example would be a robot medic that has been ordered to deliver emergency supplies to a hospital in order to save lives. On the way, it meets a soldier who has been badly injured. Should the robot abort the mission and help the soldier?
For Scheutz’s project, the decision the robot makes matters less than the fact that it can make a moral decision and give a coherent reason why — weighing relevant factors, coming to a decision, and explaining that decision after the fact. “The robots we are seeing out there are getting more and more complex, more and more sophisticated, and more and more autonomous,” he says. “It’s very important for us to get started on it. We definitely don’t want a future society where these robots are not sensitive to these moral conflicts.”
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For the ONR grant, Arkin and his team proposed a new approach. Instead of using a rule-based system like the ethical governor or a “folk psychology” approach like Scheutz’s, Arkin’s team wants to study moral development in infants. Those lessons would be integrated into the Soar architecture, a popular cognitive system for robots that employs both problem-solving and overarching goals.