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Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Canadian AI 2017: Advances in Artificial Intelligence pp 373–384Cite as

Stoic Ethics for Artificial Agents

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10233))

Abstract

We present a position paper advocating the notion that Stoic philosophy and ethics can inform the development of ethical A.I. systems. This is in sharp contrast to most work on building ethical A.I., which has focused on Utilitarian or Deontological ethical theories. We relate ethical A.I. to several core Stoic notions, including the dichotomy of control, the four cardinal virtues, the ideal Sage, Stoic practices, and Stoic perspectives on emotion or affect. More generally, we put forward an ethical view of A.I. that focuses more on internal states of the artificial agent rather than on external actions of the agent. We provide examples relating to near-term A.I. systems as well as hypothetical superintelligent agents.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.partnershiponai.org/, https://intelligence.org/, http://futureoflife.org/, http://humancompatible.ai, http://lcfi.ac.uk/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.fatml.org/.

  3. 3.

    Rule Utilitarianism addresses the problem of moral luck, and Eric O. Scott points out (personal communication) that a consequentialist analysis of an agent can also address the problem by considering a large number of trials.

  4. 4.

    It should be noted, however, that creativity is a double-edged sword for an A.I. agent, since it may come up with very unexpected and disastrous solutions to a problem, such as Bostrom’s extreme example of a superintelligent agent getting rid of cancer in humans by killing all humans [7]. That is a clear example of the difference between creativity and moral progress.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Eric O. Scott for helpful feedback and discussion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada

    Gabriel Murray

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  1. Gabriel Murray
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Correspondence to Gabriel Murray .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

    Malek Mouhoub

  2. University of Montreal, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Philippe Langlais

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Murray, G. (2017). Stoic Ethics for Artificial Agents. In: Mouhoub, M., Langlais, P. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence. Canadian AI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10233. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57351-9_42

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57351-9_42

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-57350-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-57351-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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