The Nature, Importance, and Difficulty of Machine Ethics

Machine ethics has a broad range of possible implementations in computer technology--from maintaining detailed records in hospital databases to overseeing emergency team movements after a disaster. From a machine ethics perspective, you can look at machines as ethical-impact agents, implicit ethical agents, explicit ethical agents, or full ethical agents. A current research challenge is to develop machines that are explicit ethical agents. This research is important, but accomplishing this goal will be extremely difficult without a better understanding of ethics and of machine learning and cognition. This article is part of a special issue on Machine Ethics.