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Epistemic Reasoning for Machine Ethics with Situation Calculus

Published: 30 July 2021 Publication History

Abstract

With the rapid development of autonomous machines such as selfdriving vehicles and social robots, there is increasing realisation that machine ethics is important for widespread acceptance of autonomous machines. Our objective is to encode ethical reasoning into autonomous machines following well-defined ethical principles and behavioural norms. We provide an approach to reasoning about actions that incorporates ethical considerations. It builds on Scherl and Levesque's [29, 30] approach to knowledge in the situation calculus. We show how reasoning about knowledge in a dynamic setting can be used to guide ethical and moral choices, aligned with consequentialist and deontological approaches to ethics. We apply our approach to autonomous driving and social robot scenarios, and provide an implementation framework.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Toward A Logical Theory Of Fairness and BiasTheory and Practice of Logic Programming10.1017/S147106842300015723:4(865-883)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
  • (2023)Knowledge representation and acquisition for ethical AI: challenges and opportunitiesEthics and Information Technology10.1007/s10676-023-09692-z25:1Online publication date: 11-Mar-2023
  • (2022)A Study of Common Principles for Decision-Making in Moral Dilemmas for Autonomous VehiclesBehavioral Sciences10.3390/bs1209034412:9(344)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2022

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cover image ACM Conferences
AIES '21: Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
July 2021
1077 pages
ISBN:9781450384735
DOI:10.1145/3461702
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 30 July 2021

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  1. epistemic logic
  2. knowledge representation
  3. machine ethics
  4. situation calculus

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Toward A Logical Theory Of Fairness and BiasTheory and Practice of Logic Programming10.1017/S147106842300015723:4(865-883)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
  • (2023)Knowledge representation and acquisition for ethical AI: challenges and opportunitiesEthics and Information Technology10.1007/s10676-023-09692-z25:1Online publication date: 11-Mar-2023
  • (2022)A Study of Common Principles for Decision-Making in Moral Dilemmas for Autonomous VehiclesBehavioral Sciences10.3390/bs1209034412:9(344)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2022

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