As intelligent machines assume an increasingly prominent role in our lives, there seems little doubt they eventually be called on to make important, ethically charged decisions. We think formal logic offers a way to preclude doomsday scenarios of malicious robots taking over the world. Faced with the challenge of engineering ethically correct robots, we propose a logic-based approach. We've successfully implemented and demonstrated this approach. We present it in a general methodology to answer the ethical questions that arise in entrusting robots with more and more of our welfare. A deontic logic formalizes a moral code, allowing ethicists to render theories and dilemmas in declarative form for analysis. It offers a way for human overseers to constrain robot behavior in ethically sensitive environments
['Selmer Bringsjord', 'Konstantine Arkoudas', 'Paul Bello']
Toward a General Logicist Methodology for Engineering Ethically Correct Robots