Creating an Artificial Moral Agent

I propose inter-disciplinary research focussed on the moral agency of artificial machines. Within this, I will tackle both the problem of moral responsibility in artificial entities, and work on developing a machine learning algorithm which is able to make its own ethical judgements, which could be considered a moral agent. The importance of developing research in this area cannot be overstated. New moral problems are presented weekly by technological advances - whether a poorly trained machine learning algorithm has unfairly discriminated against someone based on their race or gender, or a self-driving car has resulted in a fatality and nobody knows who to blame.

Research into the creation of ethical algorithms has begun, however only recently have there been attempts to formalise this creation process, and to properly link philosophy and ethics with AI development. My inter-disciplinary research will further bridge this gap, drawing on expertise from both philosophy and computer science, to argue for the moral responsibility of machines to be recognised, develop an ethical framework that could be implemented in such a machine, and create an algorithm which will implement the chosen framework.