Engineering moral machines

This article provides a short report on a recent Dagstuhl Seminar on “Engineering Moral Agents”. Imbuing robots and autonomous systems with ethical norms and values is an increasingly urgent challenge, given rapid developments in, for example, driverless cars, unmanned air vehicles (drones), and care assistant robots. Seminar participants discussed two immediate problems. A challenge for philosophical research is the formalisation of ethics in a format that lends itself to machine implementation; a challenge for computer science and robotics is the actual implementation of moral reasoning and conduct in autonomous systems. This article reports on these two challenges.