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arXiv · 1504.03592

Towards Verifiably Ethical Robot Behaviour

Louise A. Dennis·Michael Fisher·Alan F. T. Winfield
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Abstract

Ensuring that autonomous systems work ethically is both complex and difficult. However, the idea of having an additional `governor' that assesses options the system has, and prunes them to select the most ethical choices is well understood. Recent work has produced such a governor consisting of a `consequence engine' that assesses the likely future outcomes of actions then applies a Safety/Ethical logic to select actions. Although this is appealing, it is impossible to be certain that the most ethical options are actually taken. In this paper we extend and apply a well-known agent verification approach to our consequence engine, allowing us to verify the correctness of its ethical decision-making.

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Louise A. Dennis, Michael Fisher, Alan F. T. Winfield. 2015-04-14. Towards Verifiably Ethical Robot Behaviour. https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.03592

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