Episode Information

WWL: Teaching Machines Morality
Where We Live - with John Dankosky
Aired:
08/21/2009
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In this episode:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm - Asimov

 

Host:
John Dankosky
Guest(s):
Contributor(s):
Catie Talarski
Episode Audio

48:59 minutes (23.51 MB)
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Star Trek. Wall-E. Terminator. There are no shortage of movies in which computers take on a mind of their own. But could this scenario happen in real life?

Even if true morality for machines is a long way in the future, Wendell Wallach thinks it's necessary to build a kind of functional morality - in which artificial moral agents have some basic ethical sensitivity.

Author of Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong, Wallach recognizes that the world is increasingly populated with computers making decisions that have life and death consequences. He says there is potential for major disaster unless morality can be programmed into machines.

But whose morality? And is morality even possible to compute? Join the conversation!

This episode originally aired May 26, 2009.


 
Links for this Episode:
Wendell Wallach's Blog "Moral Machines"
Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics