Moral Machines

Teaching Robots Right from Wrong

Wendell Wallach author Colin Allen author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:20th Nov '08

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

This hardback is available in another edition too:

Moral Machines cover

Computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, and driving trains. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach argue that as robots take on more and more responsibility, they must be programmed with moral decision-making abilities, for our own safety. Taking a fast paced tour through the latest thinking about philosophical ethics and artificial intelligence, the authors argue that even if full moral agency for machines is a long way off, it is already necessary to start building a kind of functional morality, in which artificial moral agents have some basic ethical sensitivity. But the standard ethical theories don't seem adequate, and more socially engaged and engaging robots will be needed. As the authors show, the quest to build machines that are capable of telling right from wrong has begun. Moral Machines is the first book to examine the challenge of building artificial moral agents, probing deeply into the nature of human decision making and ethics.

When machines go it alone, accountability disappears - and with it the rule of law. Which is why philosophers Wendall Wallach and Colin Allen are asking how we can persuade robots to do the right thing. The result, in their seminal...book Moral Machines, makes clear just how far we have to go. * Stephen Cave, Financial Times *

ISBN: 9780195374049

Dimensions: 157mm x 236mm x 28mm

Weight: 522g

288 pages