Resources: Ethics for AI and Robotics

Potential deployments of AI and intelligent robots raise ethical questions about the impacts they may have on human well-being, just like other powerful tools or technologies such as nuclear power or genetic engineering.

Unlike other technologies, intelligent robots and other AIs have the potential to act, and to be considered, as members of our society. Since they will make their own decisions about the actions they take, it is appropriate for humans to expect them to behave ethically. This requires AI research with the goal of understanding the structure, content, and purpose of ethical knowledge, well enough to implement ethics in artificial agents.

This document collects useful resources for this research.

Resources

• AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES)

• ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT)

• AI Ethics Guidelines, a global inventory maintained by AlgorithmWatch.org.

• The New York Times Privacy Project

• MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC).

• DeepMind Ethics & Society

• AI Ethicist

• The Blind Men and the Elephant, a children's poem that teaches an important epistemological lesson about combining insights from multiple sources.

• Papers from our own Intelligent Robotics Lab

Books

• Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, 1984.
• William Poundstone, Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb, 1992.
• Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995.
• Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, 2000.
• Peter J. Richerson & Robert Boyd, Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, 2005.
• Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011.
• Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 2016.
• Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, 2018.
• Allen Buchanan & Russell Powell, The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory, 2018.
• Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny, 2019.
• Nicholas Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, 2019.
• Rutger Gregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History, 2019.
• Allen Buchanan, Our Moral Fate: Evolution and the Escape from Tribalism, 2020.
• Michael Kearns & Aaron Roth, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design, 2020.
• Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, A Recent History, 2020.
• Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (a novel), 2020.
• P. W. Singer & August Cole, Burn-In (a novel), 2020.
• Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem, 2020.
• Joseph Henrich, The WIERDest People in the World, 2020.
• Benjamin Ho, Why Trust Matters: An Economist's Guide to the Ties that Bind Us, 2021.
• Bruce Schneier, A Hacker's Mind, 2023.
• Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson, Power and Progress, 2023.