Marija Slavkovik: The Jiminy Advisor: Moral Agreements Among Stakeholders Based on Norms and Argumentation

Abstract

The talk introduces the problem of engineering machine ethics and ethical governors in general, and focuses on a recent contribution to this area: the problem of who decides what is right or wrong for a machine.

An autonomous system is constructed by a manufacturer, operates in a society subject to norms and laws, and is  interacting with end-users. All of these actors are stakeholders affected by the behaviour of the autonomous system. We address the challenge of how the ethical views of such stakeholders can be integrated in the behaviour of the autonomous system.

Biography

Marija Slavkovik is an associate professor at the University of Bergen in Norway. Her area of research is Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a focus on collective reasoning. Slavkovik is active in the AI subdisciplines of multi-agent systems, machine ethics and computational social choice.

Slavkovik believes that the world can be improved by automating away the boring, repetitive and dangerous human tasks and that AI has a crucial role to play towards this goal. Within AI, the big problem she hopes to solve is the efficient self-coordination of systems of artificial intelligent agents. She’s working on the smaller problems of collective decision making, information distortion in social networks and engineering ethical reasoning in autonomous systems.

You can also read TekLab’s interview with Associate Professor Marija Slavkovik here.