Towards verifiably ethical robot behaviour

Dennis, Louise A.; Fisher, Michael; Winfield, Alan F.T.

Abstract

Ensuring that autonomous systems work ethically is both complex and difficult. However, the idea of having an additional ‘governor’ that assesses options the system has, and prunes them to select the most ethical choices is well understood. Recent work has produced such a governor consisting of a ‘consequence engine’ that assesses the likely future outcomes of actions then applies a Safety/Ethical logic to select actions. Although this is appealing, it is impossible to be certain that the most ethical options are actually taken. In this paper we extend and apply a well-known agent verification approach to our consequence engine, allowing us to verify the correctness of its ethical decision-making.

• Presentation Conference Type: Other
• Conference Name: Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
• Start Date: Jan 25, 2015
• End Date: Jan 30, 2015
• Acceptance Date: Jan 1, 2015
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Jul 6, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 6, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: robot behaviour, ethics
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/841632
• Publisher URL: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/WS/AAAIW15/paper/view/10119
• Additional Information: Title of Conference or Conference Proceedings : Proceedings of the twenty-ninth AAAI conference on artificial intelligence
• Contract Date: Jul 6, 2016