IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2018 - 27

industry view

Krishna Sood

The Ultimate
Black Box

e are all familiar with
the textbook moral
dilemma: A car is driving on a road when
a child darts in front
of it. If the car swerves in one direction, it will hit a car in the oncoming
lane. If it swerves in the other direction, it will hit a tree. If it continues
forward, it will hit the child. The car is
travelling too fast to brake. Each decision may result in death. While the
scenario is an extreme case, drivers
make life-and-death decisions on a
daily basis. To an extent we have laws,
rules, and etiquette to guide our driving. In other situations, a driver must
rely on their internal moral compass.
But what if a human driver is not making the decision, and an autonomous
machine is? The scenarios present
difficult choices and weighty decisions for humans, let alone for car
manufacturers, developers, and engineers who must design machines with
such decision-making capabilities.
If you believe the car manufacturers, tech titans, and the U.K. government, we can expect an exponential
increase in driverless vehicles on
our roads over the next five years.
Driverless cars are already being
tested on U.K. roads. This means
that, inevitably, algorithms must be
programmed to make consequential decisions in a manner that aligns
with current laws and, where laws
do not exist, our moral sensibilities.
The authors of the AI Now report [1]

W

prill/iSTOCK

The Thorny Issue of Programming
Moral Standards in Machines

state, "AI does not exist in a vacuum." It is deployed in the real world
and has the potential to cause tangible and lasting impact. The driving
scenario illustrates the conundrum
developers face when launching
software that must be equipped to
make a moral judgment. Can they be
expected to accurately pre-program
moral-based decisions into autonomous machines? If so, whose sense

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2018.2826062
Date of publication: 31 May 2018

JUNE 2018

∕

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

of morality should prevail? There
may be ethical dilemmas, lack of
harmonized views, as well as bias
that come into play. Programming
moral standards into algorithms remains one of the thorniest [2] challenges for AI developers.
Moral standards are transient and
far from absolute. Moral inclinations
[3] may be conditioned on cultural
norms. Cultural norms are neither

27



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2018

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