Bridging the Ethical Gap: From Human Principles to Robot Instructions

Asimov's three laws of robotics and the Murphy-Woods alternative laws assume that a robot has the cognitive ability to make moral decisions, and fail to escape the myth of self-sufficiency. But ethical decision making on the part of robots in human-robot interaction is grounded on the interdependence of human and machine. Furthermore, the proposed laws are high-level principles that cannot easily be translated into machine instructions because there is an immense gap between the architecture, implementation, and activity of humans and robots in addressing ethical situations. The characterization of the ethical gap, particularly with reference to the Murphy-Woods laws, leads to a proposal for a shift in focus away from the autonomous behavior of the robot to human-robot communication at the interface, and the development of interdependence rules to underpin the process of ethical decision-making.