Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are digital technologies that will be of major importance for the development of humanity in the near future. They have raised fundamental questions about what we should do with these systems, what the systems themselves should do, what risks they involve and how we can control these. After the Introduction to the field (1), the main themes of this article are: (2) Ethical issues that arise with AI systems as objects, i.e. tools made and used by humans; here, the main sections are privacy and manipulation, opacity and bias, human-robot interaction, employment, and the effects of autonomy. (3) AI systems as subjects, i.e. when ethics is for the AI systems themselves in machine ethics and artificial moral agency. (4) The problem of a possible future AI superintelligence leading to a ‘singularity’. For each section within these themes, we provide a general explanation of the ethical issues, we outline existing positions and arguments, then we analyse how this plays out with current technologies and finally what policy consequences may be drawn.