Artificial intelligence safety engineering: Why machine ethics is a wrong approach

Roman V. Yampolskiy, University of Louisville

Abstract

Machine ethics and robot rights are quickly becoming hot topics in artificial intelligence/robotics communities. We will argue that the attempts to allow machines to make ethical decisions or to have rights are misguided. Instead we propose a new science of safety engineering for intelligent artificial agents. In particular we issue a challenge to the scientific community to develop intelligent systems capable of proving that they are in fact safe even under recursive selfimprovement.