Instilling Morality in Machines

Our own David Burke gave a talk on Wednesday at Portland State University as a speaker in the ‘Nuts and Bold Ideas‘ seminar series.  David described work done on multiagent simulations of morality during strategic interactions.  He explained how various agents in the simulations make choices about whether to cooperate based on each agent’s weighting of five moral attributes (reciprocity, harm avoidance, loyalty, authority, purity).  Not only do these simulations reflect how the population evolves over time, they provide insights into how large numbers of distributed, autonomous systems might be programmed with respect to moral decision-making and behavior.

Instilling Morality in Machines