This week, we read a piece by Susan Leigh Anderson called Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and Machine Metaethics. Susan Anderson discusses the idea of robots as agents of ethical decisions for our society. She explained how the future of robots might be training them to help humans make ethical decisions. I learned of the term called specieism, which is basically our preference over our own species. Specieism is innate and sometimes we do not realize how our actions naturally reflect this belief.
While all humans are considered the same species, we often break down our species further through race, ethnicity, religion, or gender. It has become human habit to breakup the human race into different subcategories to separate groups of people from each other. Over our existence, this specieism of people without our own racial group has enabled slavery, segregation, and other forms of discrimination. When humans have to make ethical decisions, it is easy for the speciealty to takeover in our decision making process. As we already know, all people are deserving of the same rights and consideration. This is a reason why robots could be good agents for ethical decision-making. A robot could be programmed to be fair and impartial of any race, gender, sexuality etc.
It is for this reason that I think it would be a good idea for Robot to be programmed to follow principles close to Kant. Kant explained a few principles that people should follow. One of them is the universality clause in which he states that you should make an ethical decision considering if you would want it to be followed universally including your own actions. The second clause sounds similar to the golden rule of treating others the way you would want to be treated. Kant’s ethical theories are good at preventing discrimination. There are many other ethical theories that a robot could be programmed with, but I think Kant’s ideas are of the utmost importance.