Philosophy plugged : How robotics informs ethics ∗

Designers of artificial moral agents (AMA’s) or ethical (ro-)bots will be informed by this book. However, it will also challenge moral philosophers and anyone involved in teaching ethics. Indeed, an alternative subtitle: “teaching ethicists right from wrong” would be quite appropriate. The book demonstrates quite convincingly that “you don’t really know how something works if you can’t build it”, so that “robotocists are doing philosophy, whether or not they think this is so” [5]. Yet this “philosophy” is plugged: an experimental and constructive “computational philosophy” that fits well with the notion of knowledge as coordination-ofaction (e.g. [12]) and the associated position that the physical and mental worlds (are becoming) one and the same1 In addition, the task of AMA design and construction repeatedly spins-off sharply-framed questions that are both philosophical and technological. When Ethics is plugged-in, it looks and feels quite different from the penned works of Kant, Mill, Bentham, or the Bible. In part this is because AMA development it is to a large extent a project of the military-indutrial complex, being “done” outside the public gaze (cf. [11]). For example, a military project is discussed in the book that involves installing (instilling) a “functional morality” into a robot machine gun.