Abstract
We live today in a partially artificial intelligent environment in which human intelligent agents are accompanied and assisted by artificial intelligent agents, continually endowed with more functions, skills and even competences, and having a more significant involvement and influence in the social environment. Therefore, artificial agents need to become and moral agents. Human and artificial intelligent agents are cooperating in various complex activities and thus they develop some common characteristics and properties. These features, in turn, are changing and progressing together with several increasing requirements of the different types of activities. All these changes produce a common evolution of human and artificial intelligent agents. Under these new conditions, human and artificial agents need and a shared ethics. Artificial ethics can be philosophically grounded, scientifically developed and technically implemented, it will be a more clear, coherent and consistent ethics, suitable for both human and artificial moral agents, and will be the first effective ethics.
TopBackground: Scientific, Technical, And Philosophical Premises Of Artificial Ethics
Some theoretical deficiencies of great ethical systems and some practical difficulties of applying abstract moral values in concrete conditions by individual agents have been frequently discussed by ethicists, in their common effort to establish a new foundational theory of moral choice, moral freedom and then of a deep moral conduct.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Artificial Moral Agents: A sub-set of artificial intelligent agents, which have classes of attributes of artificial agents, and other ten specific features, gradually identified in ( Pana, 2005c ; Pana, 2006a ; Pana, 2006b ; Pana, 2008b ).
Axiology: A fundamental constitutive field of philosophy, which studies the genesis, structure and functions of values, their cognition and realization, as well as the dynamics of value systems. It is also developed as a science, practiced with various instruments, including those logical, as in Formal Axiology.
Artificial: Any completely new social outcome of human activity, either theoretical or practical, such as a concept, a method or artifact, a social body, a system of relations or an institution, therefore, any kind of real mental construction or material achievement.
Co-Evolution (of Human and Artificial Moral Agents): The process and the product of the co-cognition, co-sentience, co-operation and co-construction of human and artificial intelligent agents, by which they develop new and common functions, skills and characteristics, which become sources of their further evolution.
Artificial Ethics: Is the present stage of the evolution from Philosophical Ethics to Scientific Ethics and to Technoethics. It is also based on important findings made in computer-centered ethical fields such as Information Ethics, Computing Ethics, Machine Ethics and Web Ethics. Artificial Ethics is both a conceptual and technical research field and a theoretical and practical area of moral action.
Value Systems: Besides its geosphere, biosphere, sociosphere, technospere, infosphere and noosphere, our world also presents an axiosphere, which may be analyzed inclusively in terms of Systemics: each subsystem of a social system has its own value-system, with a central value, around which orbit specific values. Similarly, every epoch imposes its own core value which attracts the appropriate set of values.
Complete Cybernetic Connection: Is a cluster of different types of connections, which consists not only of the well-known feedback , but also of feed-before and even of feed-up connections, all of them necessary in modeling and implementing moral action in the behavior of artificial moral agents.