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A Light Introduction to Machine Ethics

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Machine Ethics is a branch of ethics concerned with the field of artificial intelligence and increasingly complex machines. It's first disciplinary utterance was voiced by Mitchell Waldrop in a 1987 publication entitled "A Question of Responsibility." His argument took as a given the fact that "intelligent machines will embody values, assumptions, and purposes, whether their programmers consciously intend them to or not. Thus, as computers and robots become more and more intelligent, it becomes imperative that we think carefully and explicitly about what those built-in values are." He suggests then that "[p]erhaps what we need is, in fact, a theory and practice of machine ethics, in the spirit of Asimov's three laws of robotics" (Waldrop 1987). What's interesting to note here is that Waldrop uses science fiction literary conception as a theoretical jumping point for the field of Machine Ethics. These "three laws of robotics" were actually devised as the narrative nucleus of the 1942 fictional novelette "Runaround" by the American writer Isaac Asimov. The robot in this short story is programmed to follow three robo-ethical absolutes:         
 
  " 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
     2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
     3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law."

It's clear what the fundamental organizing principle of machines are meant to be: humans. Humanist subservience is the foundational ethical imperative of modern Machine Ethics. This inscription denies any capacity for machinic self-organization, claiming that machines can only be "ethical" when they are in service and subordination to humans. This programmed directive of constantly fulfilling human wants and needs hinders a fully-formed Machine Ethics that considers inorganic being as an intelligent and generative category of subjectivity unto itself. This is where the work of posthumanism and autopoietic machinic agency steps in to extricate machine from the mess of humanist ethics which is always projected onto non-human entities.  

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  1. Situated Knowledge and Personal Insertions Tamar Kugelmass

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  1. Machinic Autopoiesis and the Post-Anthropocentric Turn in Machine Ethics

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