AI Ethics: Artificial Intelligence, Robots, and Society

Photo via Roger K. Moore

Everyone should think about the ethics of the work they do, and the work they choose not to do.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots often seem like fun science fiction, but in fact already affect our daily lives.  For example, services like Google and Amazon help us find what we want by using AI.  Every aspect of how Facebook works is based on AI and Machine Learning (ML). The reason your phone is so useful is it is full of AI – sensing, acting, and learning about you. All these tools not only make us smarter, their intelligence is based partly on what they learn both from us and about us when we use them.  So we make the tools smarter too.

Since 1996 I have been writing about AI and Society, including maintaining this web page.  Originally I was worried because some researchers got into the news by claiming that AI or intelligent robots would one day take over the world.  The first goal of this page is to explain why that isn't going to happen.

But by 2008 the USA had more robots in Iraq (then about 9,000) than its allied countries had human troops (then about 8,500).  Also,  prominent scientists like Ron Arkin began saying we should make the robots themselves ethical, and even getting money from the US military to do that.  I've taken money from the US military too; my problem is not with that but with the claim that robots should ever be considered responsible for their actions.  The problem here is not with robots taking over the world, but with people taking over the world (or at least corrupting large parts of it) by pretending that robots are responsible. In fact people and corporations that decide how robots act. 

The fact is, robots completely belong to us. We author AI, we don't give birth to it.  People, governments and companies build, own and program robots.  Whoever owns and operates a robot is responsible for what it does.

I wrote this page because many people worry about the wrong things when they worry about AI.

Why Build AI?

If some people think robots might take over the world, or if machines really are learning to predict our everything we do, or even if a president might try to put the blame on a robot for the president's own bad military decisions, then why would anyone work on advancing AI at all? 

My personal reason for building AI is simple:  I want to help people think.

Of course, all knowledge and tools, including AI, can be used for good or for bad.  This is why it's important to think about what AI is, and how we want it to be used.  This page is designed to help people (including me) think about the ethics of AI research.

To start out with the basics: here's a Definition of Artificial Intelligence I coauthored with Jeremy Wyatt for the Children's Britannica.  And here is an interview where an American high school student asks me about studying AI.

Do we need rights for robots? No.

My students and I are among the many researchers who work on building artificial consciousness and synthetic emotions.  These aren't any more magic or deserving of ethical obligation than artificial hands or legs.  In humans consciousness and ethics are associated with our morality, but that is because of our evolutionary and cultural history.  In artefacts, moral obligation is not tied by either logical or mechanical necessity to awareness or feelings.  This is one of the reasons we shouldn't make AI responsible: we can't punish it in a meaningful way, because good AI systems are designed to be modular, so the "pain" of punishment could always be excised, unlike in nature.

Why We Shouldn't Fear AI or Robots – Machines Aren't People (or Even Apes)

1)  AI has the same ethical problems as other, conventional artifacts.

In the mid-1990s I attended a number of talks that made me realize that some people really expected AI to replace humans.  Some people were excited about this, and some were afraid.  Some of these people were well-known scientists.  Nevertheless, it seemed to me that they were all making a very basic mistake.  They were afraid that whatever was smartest would "win", somehow.  But we already have calculators and phones that can do math better than us, and they don't even take over our pockets, let alone the world.

My friend Phil Kime agreed with me, and added that he thought the problem was that people didn't have enough direct, personal experience of AI to really understand whether or not it was human.  So we wrote one of my first published papers, Just Another Artifact: Ethics and the Empirical Experience of AI.  We argued that realistic experience of AI would help us better judge what it means to be human, and help us get over our over-identification with AI systems.  We pointed out that there are ethical issues with AI, but they are all the same issues we have with other artifacts we build and value or rely on, such as fine art or sewage plants.

We first wrote it in 1996; it eventually got partially published in 1998 in a cybernetics workshop but that didn't have very good academic credibility.  So in 2010 we got back together and rewrote it for the leading international conference in AI. The updated version is called Just an Artifact: Why Machines are Perceived as Moral Agents and is in the proceedings of The Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI '11).

2)  It's wrong to exploit people's ignorance and make them think AI is human.

It is not enough for experts to understand AI.  We also have a professional obligation to communicate to everyone else.  The people who will use and buy AI should know what its risks really are.  Unfortunately, it's easier to get famous and sell robots (or cars) if you go around pretending that your robot really needs to be loved, or otherwise really is human – or super human!  In 2000 I wrote an article about this called A Proposal for the Humanoid Agent-builders League (HAL) for The Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and (Quasi-)Human Rights at AISB 2000.  I proposed creating a league of programmers dedicated to opposing the misuse of AI technology to exploit people's natural emotional empathy.  The slogans would be things like "AI: Art not Soul" or Robot's Won't Rule. 

In 2000 I didn't know that the US military might try to give robots ethical obligations, so the whole paper is written is written with some humor.  But as we've made better AI, these issues have gotten more serious.  Fortunately, academics and other experts are also getting serious.  In 2010 I was one of a couple dozen people invited by two United Kingdom research councils to work on making sure robots would fit into British society. We decided to write the Principles of Robotics, the world's first national-level soft law on AI ethics.  So a bunch of the ideas in my HAL paper are now at least informal UK policy.  The five principles are:

1. Robots should not be designed as weapons, except for national security reasons.
2. Robots should be designed and operated to comply with existing law, including privacy.
3. Robots are products: as with other products, they should be designed to be safe and secure.
4. Robots are manufactured artefacts: the illusion of emotions and intent should not be used to exploit vulnerable users.
5. It should be possible to find out who is responsible for any robot.

Notice that the first three correct Asimov's laws – it's not the robot that's responsible.

• The British Standard Institute's standard Robots and robotic devices. Guide to the ethical design and application of robots and robotic systems,
• The IEEE's Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, and even
• Wikipedia, among other places.
  

3)  Robots will never really be your friends.

In October 2007, I was invited to participate in a workshop called Artificial Companions in Society: Perspectives on the Present and Future at the Oxford Internet Institute.  I took the chance to write my third ethics article, Robots Should Be Slaves. In 2010, this (finally) came out as  a book chapter in Close Engagements with Artificial Companions:  Key social, psychological, ethical and design issues, a book edited by Yorick Wilks.  The idea is not that we should abuse robots (and of course it isn't that human slavery was OK!)  The idea is that robots, being authored by us, will always be owned—completely.  Building a robot is nothing like having a child.  Robots are more like novels than children. There's no chance involved unless you deliberately put the chance into it. There's no giant machinery of biology that evolved 4,000,000,000 years before you even had the idea of having a baby determining what components that baby can have.  Fortunately, even though we may need robots to have and understand things like artificial intelligence emotions, it is perfectly possible not to make them suffer from neglect, a lack of self-actualization, or their low social status in the way a person would. In fact I'd say it's an obligation; what right do we have to make a person-like thing that would be owned, not human?  Robots are things we build, and so we can pick their goals and behaviours.  Both buyers and builders ought to pick those goals responsibly.

People have trouble believing this, so I've written it again a bunch of times trying to clarify it in a bunch of different ways:

•  I got asked to comment on an article by Anne Foerst called Robots and Theology. Foerst is a theologian, we both worked on the Cog project at the MIT AI Laboratory in the 1990s. Foerst has the interesting perspective that robots are capable of being persons and knowing sin, and as such are a part of the spiritual world.  I argue in my commentary, Building Persons is a Choice, that while it is interesting to use robots to reason about what it means to be human, calling them "human" dehumanises real people.  Worse, it gives people the excuse to blame robots for their actions, when really anything a robot does is entirely our own responsibility.
• Sometime around 2012 I started working on a paper that was finally called Patiency Is Not a Virtue: The Design of Intelligent Systems and Systems of Ethics when it finally got published in a journal in 2018 (Ethics and Information Technology – getting ideas right AND communicating them can both take a long time, so scientists often talk about them at conferences before final publication.) The idea is complicated: it's that both AI and ethical systems are things we build together, so whether AI is a moral subject (that is, is responsible for itself, or is something we're responsible to) is a matter of choice, not something scientists can discover.  Since it's easier to author AI than to totally overhaul our ethics, I recommend building AI to minimise human social disruption.
  
• In 2016 the European Parliament suggested sometimes AI should be legally responsible for itself. This is a super bad idea. Two law professors (Mihailis E. Diamantis and Thomas D. Grant) and I dropped everything to explain why in Of, For, and By the People: The Legal Lacuna of Synthetic Persons, which came out in the journal Artificial Intelligence and Law in September 2017. We wanted to make sure the European Commission didn't require or even encourage EU national governments to do this.  An organisation that contains humans is sometimes considered "a legal person", but that only works because real humans are held accountable if the organisation does bad things. In fact, if anything, there's already a problem of people not being held sufficiently to account for organisations. This is when the organisation is called a "shell company" and is a major source of many forms of corruption, like money laundering. An AI legal person would be the ultimate shell company.
  

Why We Should Worry About AI Anyway

Being worried about the wrong things doesn't mean that there's nothing to worry about.  Artificial Intelligence is not as special as many people think, but it is further accelerating a rapidly-accelerating phenomenon that's been going on for about 10,000 years: human culture.  Human culture is changing almost every aspect of life on earth, particularly human society.  

4)  Human culture is already a superintelligent machine turning the planet into apes, cows, and paper clips.

One of the reasons I object to AI scaremongering is that even where the fears are realistic, such as Nick Bostrom and colleague's description of overwhelming, self-modifying superintelligence, making AI into the bogeyman displaces that fear 30-60 years into the future.  In fact, AI is here now, and even without AI, our hyperconnected socio-technical culture already creates radically new dynamics and challenges for both human society and our environment.  Bostrom writes about (among other things) a future machine intelligence autonomously pursuing a worthwhile goal might incidentally convert the planet into paper clips.  We might better think of our current culture itself as the superintelligent but non-cognizant machine – a machine that has learned to support more biomass on the planet than ever before (by mining fossil fuels) but is changing all that life (at least the large animals) into just a few species (humans, dogs, cats, sheep, goats, and cows). No one ever specifically intended to wipe out the rest of the large animals and other biodiversity on the planet, but we're doing it.   Similarly, no one specifically decided that children weren't sufficiently monitored by their parents up until the 1990s, but now childhood and parenthood have been entirely transformed in just a few decades.  These are just two consequences or our expanding cognition, and AI is very much a part of that.

In 2014 I wrote an academic book chapter about this called Artificial Intelligence & Pro-Social Behaviour.  Later I wrote a shorter blogpost with the best part (it also talks about "Artificial General Intelligence.")  These changes aren't entirely due to AI.  They're also the result of better communication brought about by mobile phones and social media, the simple fact that there are more people, and processes of cultural and legislative change.  But AI, particularly machine learning, plays a large and growing role.

5)  Big data + better models = ever-improving prediction, even about individuals.

AI and computer science, particularly machine learning but also HCI, are increasingly able to help out research in the social sciences.  Fields that are benefiting include political science, economics, psychology, anthropology and business / marketing.   As I said at the top of the page, understanding human behaviour may be the greatest benefit of artificial intelligence if it helps us find ways to reduce conflict and live sustainably.  However, knowing fully well what an individual person is likely to do in a particular situation is obviously a very, very great power.  Bad applications of this power include the deliberate addiction of customers to a product or service, skewing vote outcomes through disenfranchising some classes of voters by convincing them their votes don't matter, and even just old-fashioned stalking.  It's pretty easy to guess when someone will be somewhere these days.

As science – and commerce, and government – learns more and more, our models of human behaviour get better and better.  As our models improve, we need less and less data about any particular individual to predict what they are going to do.  So just practising good data hygiene is not enough, even if that were a skill we could teach everyone.  My professional opinion is that there is no going back on this, but that isn't to say society is doomed. What we do matters.

Think of it this way.  We all know that the police, the military, even most of our neighbours could get into our house if they wanted to.  But we don't expect them to do that.  And, generally speaking, if anyone does get into our house, we are able to prosecute them legally, and to claim any damages back from insurance.  I think our personal data should be like our houses.  First of all, we shouldn't ever be seen as selling our own data, just leasing it for a particular purpose.  This is the model software companies already use for their products; we should just apply the same legal reasoning to we humans.  Then if we have any reason to suspect our data has been used in a way we didn't approve, we should be able to prosecute.  That is, the applications of our data should be subject to regulations that protect ordinary citizens from the intrusions of governments, corporations and even friends.

You might also be interested in the courses I teach, which include AI ethics materials

• CM50272: Humans and Intelligent Machines  This is a new course for 2018, designed fors Bath's new MScs, Machine Learning and Autonomous Systems, and Robotics and Autonomous Systems. The course is lead by Eamonn O'Neill but I will be coteaching it, also with Wenbin Li, and that link leads to my slides.
  
• CM 50230 and CM30229:  Intelligent Control and Cognitive Systems  This course I devleoped (first taught in 2011) looks at building cognitive systems, with coursework and laboratories on Robots, Biological Simulations, and VR Avatars / Game AI. Also emphasises research reading and writing, particularly in the postgraduate version of the course. 
  

More from me:

• No One Should Trust AI, an invited, reviewed, and edited blogpost by the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, for their Artificial Intelligence and Global Governance blog series. No one should trust AI because we ought to build it for accountability. Then we would have certain knowledge of who's at fault, and trust isn't needed, see the scientific trust paper just below with Paul Rauwolf as first author.  Published November 2018.
• Paul Rauwolf & I, Expectations of Fairness and Trust Co-Evolve in Environments of Partial Information, in Dynamic Games and Applications 8(4):891-917. Highly relevant to information technology policy: The more you know, the less you need to trust, though if you know nothing or don't have a choice of who you work with, people have no reason to be trustworthy. Trust comes with PARTIAL information, AND at least some freedom.
  
• Patiency Is Not a Virtue: The Design of Intelligent Systems and Systems of Ethics, (2018) in Ethics and Information Technology 20(1)19-26. An earlier version appeared the AISB 2012 proceedings below and the AAAI Spring Symposium Ethical and Moral Considerations in Nonhuman Agents. Both AI and ethical systems are cultural artefacts, so whether AI is a moral subject (can take responsibility or be something we're obliged to) is a matter of choice, not something that needs to be "discovered."
  
• This is also the insight behind the EPSRC Principles, as I explain in The Meaning of the EPSRC Principles of Robotics, Connection Science 29(2):130-136 2017. Open access version.
• Miles Brundage, Shahar Avin, Jack Clark, Helen Toner, Peter Eckersley, Ben Garfinkel, Allan Dafoe, Paul Scharre, Thomas Zeitzoff, Bobby Filar, Hyrum Anderson, Heather Roff, Gregory C. Allen, Jacob Steinhardt, Carrick Flynn, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Simon Beard, Haydn Belfield, Sebastian Farquhar, Clare Lyle, Rebecca Crootof, Owain Evans, Michael Page, Joanna Bryson, Roman Yampolskiy, Dario Amodei, The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation , a technical report apparently published by all seven of the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge, Center for a New American Security, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and OpenAI, from February 2018.
• Joanna J. Bryson, Mihailis E. Diamantis, and Thomas D. Grant, Of, For, and By the People: The Legal Lacuna of Synthetic Persons. Artificial Intelligence and Law 25(3):273–291 [Sep 2017]. Two professors of law and I argue that it would be a terrible, terrible idea to make something strictly AI (in contrast to an organisation also containing humans) a legal person. In fact, the only good thing about this is that it gives us a chance to think about where legal personhood has already been overextended (we give examples).
  
• Joanna J. Bryson and Alan F. T. Winfield, Standardizing Ethical Design for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, IEEE Computer 50(5):116-119.  What do you do when technology like AI changes faster than the law can keep up?  One thing is have law enforce standards maintained by professional organisations, which are hopefully more agile and informed. Invited commentary.  Open access version, authors' final copy.
  
• Two of my former PhD students worked with me on a particular aspect of AI ethics, the transparency of AI systems. Our first empirical paper on AI ethics: Robert H Wortham, Andreas Theodorou, Joanna J Bryson, Improving Robot Transparency: Real-Time Visualisation of Robot AI Substantially Improves Understanding in Naive Observers. In The 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, RO-MAN 2017. An earlier version was in the IJCAI-2016 Ethics for Artificial Intelligence Workshop. See also
• Andreas Theodorou,  Rob Wortham, and Joanna J. Bryson,  Designing and implementing transparency for real time inspection of autonomous robots. Connection Science 29(3):230-241 Open access version.
• Robert H. Wortham, Andreas Theodorou, Robot transparency, trust and utility. Connection Science 29(3):242-248.
• Aylin Caliskan, Joanna J. Bryson, & Arvind Narayanan, Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human biases. Science 356 (6334):183-186 [14 Apr 2017].  Be sure to also look at the supplement, which gives the stimuli and shows similar results for a different corpus and word-embedding model.   Meaning really is no more or less than how a word is used, so AI absorbs true meaning, including prejudice.  We demonstrate this empirically.  This is an extension of my research programme into semantics originally deriving from my interest in the origins of human cognition, and I'd say it is more cognitive science than AI ethics, but it deserves a mention since it shows machine learning replicates our biases in AI. Open access version, authors' final copy of both the main article and the supplement.
• Joanna J. Bryson, The Vital Need For The Unconscious City, in Anthologies, Conscious Cities: Bridging Neuroscience, Architecture, and Technology, Anne Fritz and Itai Palti, eds.
• Artificial Intelligence and Pro-Social Behaviour, from the Springer volume Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems derived from Catrin Misselhorn's 2013 meeting, Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems. 
• David Gunkel and Joanna J. Bryson (eds.), Introduction to the Special Issue on Machine Morality: The Machine as Moral Agent and Patient, Philosophy & Technology, 27(1):5--8, March 2014. 
  
• This derived from The Machine Question: AI, Ethics and Moral Responsibility, David J. Gunkel, Joanna J. Bryson and Steve Torrance, (eds.).  A symposium proceedings published by The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour, 3-5 July, 2012.
• Just an Artifact: Why Machines are Perceived as Moral Agents, with Philip P. Kime, in the proceedings of The Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI '11).  Final camera-ready version from April 2011.  This is a substantial updating & improvement of, Just Another Artifact: Ethics and the Empirical Experience of AI, see below.
• Why Robot Nannies Probably Won't Do Much Psychological Damage. A commentary on an article by Sharkey and Sharkey, The Crying Shame of Robot Childcare Companions, in Interaction Studies 11(2):196-200.
• Robots Should Be Slaves.  In Close Engagements with Artificial Companions:  Key social, psychological, ethical and design issues, published by John Benjamins in March 2010, edited by Yorick Wilks.  The chapter says companion is the wrong metaphor for robots, which leads to the misallocation of both resources and responsibility to the detriment of our society.  Draft from 21 May 2009.
• Building Persons is a Choice an invited commentary on an article by Anne Foerst called Robots and Theology, in Erwägen Wissen Ethik 20(2):195-197 (2009). It isn't that AI couldn't conceivably deserve ethical obligation, rather it would be unethical for us to allow it to.
• A Proposal for the Humanoid Agent-builders League (HAL) in the proceedings of  Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and (Quasi-)Human Rights (AISB 2000, John Barnden, ed.)
• Just Another Artifact: Ethics and the Empirical Experience of AI. Coauthored with my friend Phil Kime, presented at the Fifteenth International Congress on Cybernetics, 1998, but they only printed the first 6 pages in their proceedings...

• I can't really keep up with my media appearances or people posting videos of my talks any more, but I try to list some of it on my long, academic curriculum vitae. For my latest views, see also my blogposts on AI and on Ethics.
• And here's a few from March 2017-February 2018:
• Featured back-page interview, Tages Anzeiger (Wochenende Wissen), Die Roboterversteherin, p. 60, 4 March 2017.
• Our work got cited in the Stephen Colbert segment “Stephen Colbert’s Cyborgasm:
  Artificial Intelligence” (3:20–4:10) 11 October 2017.
• Newspaper interview: “Kabelbündel fürs Grobe,” full page interview with art and photo, Taz, p. 13, 26 July 2017.
• Individual interview for the blog of Austrian National Radio (ORF.at), “Maschinen haben längst Bewusstsein [Machines are already conscious]”, 4 September 2017.
• “The real project of AI ethics” keynote, O’Reilly’s Strata Data Conference, New York, NY, 28 September 2017. The 15 minute video was called ‘Fascinating’ by Garry Kasparov and Tim O’Reilly.
• Panellist for The Guardian podcast: “Questioning AI: what kind of intelligence will we create?”
  published 10 January 2018.
  
• Featured on NPR (WNYC, but broadcast internationally) radio show, “Are You There Siri? It’s Me, Margaret: A Look at The Rapidly Changing World of AI,” broadcast 1 January 2018.
  
• Quoted extensively, “Warum es wichtig ist, wie Roboter aussehen [Why it matters how robots
  look]”, Krautreporter, 17 December 2017.
  
• March 2017: Podcast / interview for an hour on AI ethics etc. for the Machine Ethics Podcasts.
  
• February 2016:  
• I got named in AI Influencers 2017: Top 30 people in AI you should follow on Twitter by some combination of IBM Watson and Trips Reddy.
• I got quoted about how to program AI (what my PhD is actually in, but no one ever asks that!) by The Register: Your IDE won't change, but YOU will: HELLO! Machine learning.
  
• January 2017: 
  
• I appeared on a panel hosted by Brian Cox in front of 2900 people at the Royal Festival Hall on 10th January.  You can see the video here: Brian Cox presents Science Matters - Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.  Apparently our tickets got scalped at a higher price than Adele's!
  
• I also did a reddit Science AMA (ask me anything) on AI and AI ethics on 13 January 2017.  
• TechCrunch liked my AMA.
• July 2016: I'm in the 1 July Guardian Science weekly podcast with Oxford's Paul Newman.  It's an exciting 30-minute discussion of how AI is and will affect our society, but the Guardian pitched it as Do we want robots to be like humans, which might undersell it.
  
• April 2016: I'm on a BBC Radio 4 show, FutureProofing, concerning Memory (that's a link to the podcast.) It came out with our book Memory in the Twenty-First Century.
• Business Insider interviewed me in July 2015, different bits of content cropped up different times…
  
• December 2015:  The best science fiction, as picked by 20 A.I. experts from Business Insider (I picked Ancillary Justice).
  
• November 2015:  These are the most mind-blowing robots, according to 17 artificial intelligence researchers
• September 2015:  18 artificial intelligence researchers reveal the profound changes coming to our lives
  
• October 2015: 
  
• I'm on the Guardian Tech Podcast from 8 October  Robots are coming for your job ... and that's not all, discussing Martin Ford's "The Rise of the Robots" with Deloitte's cheif economist, Ian Stewart, and the Guardian's Olly Mann and Alex Hern. 
  
• I also appeared at the Global Women's Forum in France in a plenary panel On the cusp: The promise of breakthrough brain research (that's a youtube video) with Maria Cattauli-Ilvanos as the moderator and Stephanie Lacour as the other panel member.
• And I participated in a debate in London, You, robot! What does it mean to regulate artificial intelligence? which got written up in Managing Partner as Artificial intelligence to create an industrial revolution for the legal sector.
  
• September 2015:
  
• I was on Newsnight again, this time with Chris Bishop!  But again they aren't keeping their videos online (I do have a 500M recording though but I'm not sure where / whether to post it.) 
  
• However, the Women's Forum published a nice interview with me:  Special Report: Does Artificial Intelligence benefit all parts of our society?
• January 2015:  I debated James Barratt again for the Channel 4 News feature Will super-intelligent machines kill us all?. Unfortunately, that page has a lot of Bostrom / Musk on it, but also our video. We were supposed to be talking about middle-class income, but Barratt made it about battlefield robots. Of course, I know a lot about those too...
• December 2014:  My university loved the Newsnight thing, so talked me into taking on Stephen Hawking and his warnings concerning AI as a threat.   The BBC also called again, so you can listen to me debate AI risk on their World Service.
• October 2014:  Appeared on BBC Newsnight discussing Google DeepMind and the Google ethics board.  Transcript and pictures.
• May 2014:  Invited talk for the Oxford Martin School, Containing the intelligence explosion:  the role of transparency (YouTube, 1:21:41 including Q&A)
• February 14 2014 An article in Slate with Miles Brundage, Why Watson is real Artificial Intelligence.
• August 2013:  I was an invited panel participant at IJCAI 2013 The Future of AI: What If We Succeed?
• June 2012:  A letter I wrote about the EPSRC principles of robotics appeared in The Economist.
  
• April 2011:  The EPSRC released their Principles of Robotics.  I'm one of the authors and contributed a lot to the text there.  The principles were written at a special meeting the EPSRC held on robot ethics in September 2010.
  
• January 2011: I've accepted an invitation to join Lifeboat, though I don't know much about them. Apparently I am helping safeguard humanity from robots and AI.  If you send me email with any comments pro and con about Lifeboat, I'd appreciate it!
  
• August 2008: I'm one of the experts interviewed for the Heart Robot project.
• March 2008: A reply to a critique of Just Another Artifact:

  Thanks for linking to my 1998 paper (Just Another Artifact: Ethics and the Empirical Experience of AI), but I think your argument is a gross oversimplification of my and Phil Kime's point.  Of course autonomous robot weapons can kill you, and are killing people now.  But it isn't because some AI has turned evil.  AI is no more to blame than other artifacts of our culture, like our foreign policy.  Rather than worrying about AI specifically, people should be worrying about government, culture and decision making in general.  The threats (and promises) of AI are real, but not as unique as people think.  I believe the "singularity" & "ethical robots" (e.g. Arkin) debates are a distraction from the real problem of designing and choosing appropriate governing techniques and assigning appropriate responsibility and blame for societal-level decisions that affect us all.

• May 2006: An interview by the BBC on robots taking over the world. 
• January 2005:  My statement on the ethics of primate research.
• Will robots take over the world? (what are their motivations?).  A statement by me for a 2004 Focus magazine article by Sunny Bains.
• July 2000: A snippet of private email & some off-the-record comments on robots taking over the world were reported by The Register.  I didn't correct the record until the same text mysteriously turned up in The Guardian four years later (and therefore on the first page of Google searches for me).  Blay & I apparently got the first ever "correction"/apology from Bad Science, but they still got my title & institution wrong.
  

Mostly by coincidence, I've started doing scientific work on the origins of (human) ethical behaviour. 

On a less related note than a lot of people think, I also write about consciousness, both machine & not.  This work came around partly because so many people associate consciousness and ethics, but do they know why?

• Joanna J. Bryson, The Vital Need For The Unconscious City, in Anthologies, Conscious Cities: Bridging Neuroscience, Architecture, and Technology, 2017, Anne Fritz and Itai Palti, eds. A short popular science piece on the danger of everyone  knowing so much no one is any longer unique.
• Robert H. Wortham and Joanna J. Bryson, A role for action selection in consciousness: an investigation of a second-order Darwinian mind, in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings, published December 2016. The title references my earlier paper, A Role for Consciousness in Action Selection in the International Journal of Machine Consciousness 4(2):471-482, which I'm not sure is well enough known to take the confusion of the joke, but this paper has a fun model of selection for metacognition. It's mostly by Rob. (Dan Dennett is teaching this paper now to his students! I've also seen him teach our Semantics paper & and my Slaves paper at MIT...)
  
• A Role for Consciousness in Action Selection in the International Journal of Machine Consciousness 4(2):471-482. The role is not so much for immediate selection, but for updating models for future selection. In case you don't have access, here's the submitted draft from July 2012. This is probably my best current paper on machine consciousness.
  
• Crude, Cheesy, Second-Rate Consciousness from the proceedings of Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems (BICS) 2010.  This is an update of an AISB 2009 update of the original Vienna Consciousness 2008 paper.
• Patiency Is Not a Virtue: The Design of Intelligent Systems and Systems of Ethics, (2018) in Ethics and Information Technology 20(1)19-26. Explains that consciousness isn't what you really care about, you really care about moral agency and moral patiency, and since we author AI we can determine those things about it.
  
• Age-Related Inhibition and Learning Effects: Evidence from Transitive Performance, in Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2009) pp. 3040-3045. Backs up the science of the "Crude, Cheesy" paper.
• This work all came out of my interest in primate task learning, see the original model here: Primate errors in transitive `inference': A two-tier learning model, with Jonathan C. S. Leong.  In Animal Cognition 10(1)1-15.
• Now for the tricky bit... (originally "Consciousness Is Easy, but Learning Is Hard"), invited article for The Philosopher's Magazine 28(4):70-72. Explains that everything with RAM has functional self awareness, video cameras have perfect memory, what makes us intelligent (and is computationally difficult) is generalising from experience, which involves forgetting and unconsciousness. (To be honest, I think our obsession with consciousness comes from our lack of conscious access to so much of our own minds, but I haven't written about that.  Yet.)
  

Similarly to AI consciousness, here's some of my papers on emotions, which I also don't believe determine ethical obligation, but are clearly involved in humans' ethical intuitions:

• Swen E. Gaudl and Joanna J. Bryson, The extended ramp model: A biomimetic model of behaviour arbitration for lightweight cognitive architectures, in Cognitive Systems Research, 50:1-9 (this journal seems to count issues as volumes). Like the title says, an attempt to simplify and improve on the systems for representing emotions and drives I wrote with Emmanuel Tanguy and Phil Rolphshagen (the Dynamic Emotion Representation (DER) and Fexible Latching respectively, see below).
• Eugene Y. Bann and Joanna J. Bryson The Conceptualisation of Emotion Qualia: Semantic Clustering of Emotional Tweets, Computational Models of Cognitive Processes: Proceedings of the 13th Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop (NCPW), J. Mayor and P. Gomez (eds), 2014, pp. 249–263.
• Eugene Y. Bann and Joanna J. Bryson, Measuring Cultural Relativity of Emotional Valence and Arousal using Semantic Clustering and Twitter, Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), Berlin, August 2013, pp. 1809–1815.
• Philipp Rohlfshagen and Joanna J. Bryson, Flexible Latching: A Biologically-Inspired Mechanism for Improving the Management of Homeostatic Goals in Cognitive Computation 2(3):230-241.  Discusses a simple add-on mechanism for dynamic plans to allow sensible ordering of high-level drives, and explains why this problem is different from detailed action selection.  Lots of experiments, some maths and some discussion of the literature on cognitive control in natural and artificial intelligence.  Associated software comes with the standard python/jython distribution of BOD.
• Simplifying the Design of Human-Like Behaviour:  Emotions as Durative Dynamic State for Action Selection, with Emmanuel A. R. Tanguy,  in The International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 1(1):30-50 January 2010.  Penultimate draft, from May 2009. Related software and articles.
• Emmanuel A. R. Tanguy,  Phil J. Willis and I, Emotions as Durative Dynamic State for Action Selection, in IJCAI 2007.  The 6-page version of the AI part of Emmanuel's PhD on the Dynamic Emotion Representation, which may more generally be useful for selection problems that fall between long-term potentiation (learning) and nerve-cell firing (acting).  Associated software.
• Emmanuel A. R. Tanguy,  Phil J. Willis, and I,  A Dynamic Emotion Representation Model Within a Facial Animation System.  In The International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, 3(3):293-300, 2006.  This paper presents a Dynamic Emotion Representation (DER) model, its implementation and an instance of a full humanoid emotional model built with it.

Reminder:  HTML and bibtex for formal citations for the above papers are all available on my publications page.

More from other people:

• Can Robots Fall in Love, and Why Would They?, a great interview with Peter Norvig and Dan Dennett, where Dennett expands on my line of argument.
• Here's a more professional academic page on Ethics in Computing: Artificial Intelligence.
• Here's a more funny page on the robot apocalypse from Randall Munroe.
• Here's the Ethics Page of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
• Where's my robot? A good question and a thoughtful blog.
• Developmental Technology by Marina Umaschi Bers at Tufts is for helping children and teenagers understand and develop their self concept.
• Sherry Turkle.  Jim Moor.
• For a dissenting perspective, the Moral Machines Blog by Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen, or The Machine Question by David Gunkel.
• Why an intelligence explosion is probable.
• Rights for Robots.
• The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots.
  
• Creating Friendly AI from the singularity folks.  One day in 1995, my friends from the MIT AI Lab and I went over to the Media Lab to see a talk about the "coming singularity" (when AI becomes smarter than people) by Vernor Vinge.  That talk was one of the reasons I wanted to write "Just Another Artifact".  We left the talk before it was over because it generally seemed silly and was getting repetitive and we needed to get back to work.  But on the way back, while I was listening to some of my fairly brilliant friends (e.g. Charles Isbell and Carl de Marken) belittle the chances of their AI ever being able to take over a toaster, it did remind me of the scientists of Los Alamos betting facetiously on the effect size of the first atomic bomb.
• Here's what Vinge was thinking in 2008.  A bit more positive than a decade earlier, but otherwise similar.  I do think it's good to have people who really think about the long term.
• Some of the arguments in the AI Companions piece were inspired by White Dot.