About a year ago, there was a bit of furore in the newspapers on digital assistants, like Amazon Echo’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, or Microsoft’s Cortana, in a smart home to possibly snitch on you if you’re the marijuana-smoking family member [1,2]. This may be relevant if you live in a conservative state or country, where it is still illegal to do so. Behind it is a multi-agent system that would do some argumentation among the stakeholders (the kids, the parents, and the police). That example sure did get the students’ attention in the computer ethics class I taught last year. It did so too with an undergraduate student—double majoring in compsci and philosophy—who opted to do the independent research module. Instead of the multiple actor scenario, however, we considered it may be useful to equip such a digital assistant, or an artificial moral agent (AMA) more broadly, with multiple moral theories, so that a user would be able to select their preferred theory and let the AMA make the appropriate decision for her on whichever dilemma comes up. This seems preferable over an at-most-one-theory AMA.
(image from robotise; https://robotise.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/robot-ethics-3.jpg)
For instance, there’s the “Mia the alcoholic” moral dilemma [3]: Mia is disabled and has a new model of the carebot that can fetch her alcoholic drinks in the comfort of her home. At some point, she’s getting drunk but still orders the carebot to bring her one more tasty cocktail. Should the carebot comply? The answer depends on one’s ethical viewpoint. If you had answered with ‘yes’, you probably would not want to buy a carebot that would refuse to serve you, and likewise vv. But how to make the AMA culturally and ethically more flexible to be able to adjust to the user’s moral preferences?
The first step in that direction has now been made by that (undergrad) research student, George Rautenbach, which I supervised. The first component is a three-layered approach, with at the top layer a ‘general ethical theory’ model (called Genet) that is expressive enough to be able to model a specific ethical theory, such as utilitarianism, ethical egoism, or Divine Command Theory. This was done for those three and Kantianism, so as to have a few differences in consequence-based or not, the possible ‘patients’ of the action, sort of principles, possible thresholds and such. These reside in the middle layer. Then there’s Mia’s egoism, the parent’s Kantian viewpoint about the marijuana, a train company’s utilitarianism to sort out the trolley problem, and so on at the bottom layer, which are instantiations of the respective specific ethical theories in the middle layer.
The Genet model was evaluated by demonstrating that those four theories can be modelled with Genet and the individual theories were evaluated with a few use cases to show that the attributes stored are relevant and sufficient for those reasoning scenarios for the individuals. For instance, eventually, Mia’s egoism wouldn’t get her another drink fetched by the carebot, but as a Kantian, she would have been served.
The details are described in the technical report “Toward Equipping Artificial Moral Agents with multiple ethical theories” [4] and the models are also available for download as XML files and an OWL file. To get all this to work in a device, there’s still the actual reasoning component to implement (a few architectures exist for that) and for a user to figure out which theory they actually subscribe to so as to have the device configured accordingly. And of course, there is a range of ethical issues with digital assistants and AMAs, but that’s a topic perhaps better suited for the SIPP (FKA computer ethics) module in our compsci programme [5] and other departments.
p.s.: a genet is also an agile cat-like animal mostly living in Africa, just in case you were wondering about the abbreviation of the model.
References
[1] Swain, F. AIs could debate whether a smart assistant should snitch on you. New Scientist, 22 February 2019. Online: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2194613-ais-could-debatewhether-a-smart-assistant-should-snitch-on-you/ (last accessed: 5 March 2020).
[2] Liao, B., Slavkovik, M., van der Torre, L. Building Jiminy Cricket: An Architecture for Moral Agreements Among Stakeholders. ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society 2019, Hawaii, USA. Preprint: arXiv:1812.04741v2, 7 March 2019.
[3] Millar, J. An ethics evaluation tool for automating ethical decision-making in robotsand self-driving cars. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 30(8):787–809, 2016.
[4] Rautenbach, G., Keet, C.M. Toward equipping Artificial Moral Agents with multiple ethical theories. University of Cape Town. arxiv:2003.00935, 2 March 2020.
[5] Computer Science Department. Social Issues and Professional Practice in IT & Computing. Lecture Notes. 6 December 2019.
Keet blog 
