ABSTRACT
This book concludes by looking toward the future. It examines the ethical conundrums posed by increasingly intelligent and autonomous machines, which may someday become superintelligent and design themselves. Can a machine be autonomous in the same sense as a human? Who is responsible for wrongs committed by autonomous machines? Do we owe obligations to them? For example, is it murder to throw one in the trash when it becomes obsolete? Do machines themselves have obligations? How can an ethical code be programmed into a machine? The analysis of autonomy in Chapter 6 is well suited to deal with these questions, and it delivers some surprising answers. The task of developing ethics for machines may push us toward a more adequate ethical theory for humans, the kind of rigorous theory that this book attempts to develop.
