An Ethics Evaluation Tool for Automating Ethical Decision-Making in Robots and Self-Driving Cars

As we march down the road of automation in robotics andartificial intelligence, we will need to automate an increasingamount of ethical decision-making in order for our devices tooperate independently from us. But automating ethical deci-sion-making raises novel questions for engineers anddesigners, who will have to make decisions about how toaccomplish that task. For example, some ethical decision-making involves hard moral cases, which in turn requires userinput if we are to respect established norms surroundingautonomy and informed consent. The author considers thisand other ethical considerations that accompany the automa-tion of ethical decision-making. He proposes some generalethical requirements that should be taken into account in thedesign room, and sketches a design tool that can be integratedinto the design process to help engineers, designers, ethicists,and policymakers decide how best to automate certain formsof ethical decision-making.