ABSTRACT
Once the stuff of science fiction, recent progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning has raised public concern and academic interest in the safety and ethics of the new tools and techniques emerging from these fields of research. The speculative worlds of science fiction have given rise to imaginative technologies, fueled consumer desires, and guided the design of real products suited for everyday life. Like most new fields of knowledge, machine ethics and robot ethics emerged from work in other disciplines. Questions that have become foundational for machine ethics and robot ethics began to intrigue scholars in the 1980s and 1990s. Robot ethics emerged out of the broader field of engineering ethics and its subfield computer ethics. The new field of research that is focused on the prospects for designing computer and robotic systems that demonstrate sensitivity to human values, and factor these into making decisions in morally significant situations, goes by various names.
