Conferences

AAAI Fall 2005 Symposium on Machine Ethics
November 3-6, 2005
Hyatt Regency Crystal City
Arlington, Virginia

Past research concerning the relationship between technology and ethics has largely focused on responsible and irresponsible use of technology by human beings, with a few people being interested in how human beings ought to treat machines. In all cases, only human beings have engaged in ethical reasoning. The time has come for adding an ethical dimension to at least some machines.

Recognition of the ethical ramifications of behavior involving machines, as well as recent and potential developments in machine autonomy, necessitates this. In contrast to computer hacking, software property issues, privacy issues and other topics normally ascribed to computer ethics, machine ethics is concerned with the behavior of machines towards human users and other machines. We contend that research in machine ethics is key to alleviating concerns with autonomous systems—it could be argued that the notion of autonomous machines without such a dimension is at the root of all fear concerning machine intelligence. Further, investigation of machine ethics could enable the discovery of problems with current ethical theories, advancing our thinking about ethics. We intend to bring together interested participants from a wide variety of disciplines to the end of forging a set of common goals for machine ethics investigation and the research agendas required to accomplish them.

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to the following:

• Improvement of interaction between artificially and naturally intelligent systems through the addition of an ethical dimension to artificially intelligent systems
• Enhancement of machine-machine communication and cooperation through an ethical dimension
• Design of systems that provide expert guidance in ethical matters
• Deeper understanding of ethical theories through computational simulation
• Development of decision procedures for ethical theories that have multiple prima facie duties
• Computability of ethics
• Theoretical and practical objections to machine ethics
• Impact of machine ethics on society

Potential participants are requested to submit either a full technical paper (not exceeding 5000 words) or a brief statement of interest (not exceeding 1000 words). Also invited are proposals for panels that state one or more fundamental issues/questions concerning machine ethics and take a stand on them supported by cogent arguments. Send submissions via email attachments to anderson@hartford.edu.

Organizing Committee:

Michael Anderson (cochair), University of Hartford (anderson@hartford.edu); Susan Leigh Anderson (cochair), University of Connecticut (susan.anderson@uconn.edu); Chris Armen (cochair), Trinity College (chris.armen@trincoll. edu)

Important Dates:

May 2, 2005: Submission due
May 23, 2005: Notifications of acceptance sent
September 13, 2005: Accepted camera-ready copy due

Call for Participation

Sponsored by the American Association of Artificial Intelligence in cooperation with the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology, the National Science Foundation, and the Machine Ethics Consortium.