Normative uncertainty and societal preferences

Normative uncertainty and societal preferences: The problem with evaluative standards

Kuilman, S.K. (TU Delft Interactive Intelligence)
Andriamahery, Koji (IMT Mines Alès)
Jonker, C.M. (TU Delft Interactive Intelligence)
Cavalcante Siebert, L. (TU Delft Interactive Intelligence)

2023

Many technological systems these days interact with their environment with increasingly little human intervention. This situation comes with higher stakes and consequences that society needs to manage. No longer are we dealing with 404 pages: AI systems today may cause serious harm. To address this, we wish to exert a kind of control over these systems, so that they can adhere to our moral beliefs. However, given the plurality of values in our societies, which “oughts” ought these machines to adhere to? In this article, we examine Borda voting as a way to maximize expected choice-worthiness among individuals through different possible “implementations” of ethical principles. We use data from the Moral Machine experiment to illustrate the effectiveness of such a voting system. Although it appears to be effective on average, the maximization of expected choice-worthiness is heavily dependent on the formulation of principles. While Borda voting may be a good way of ensuring outcomes that are preferable to many, the larger problems in maximizing expected choice-worthiness, such as the capacity to formulate credences well, remain notoriously difficult; hence, we argue that such mechanisms should be implemented with caution and that other problems ought to be solved first.

normative uncertainty
limit of forms
ethics
preference profiles
moral machine
self-driving cars

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ee216e0c-64bf-4414-886d-a3acac3117a0

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnrgo.2023.1147211

2673-6195

Frontiers in Neuroergonomics, 4

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2023 S.K. Kuilman, Koji Andriamahery, C.M. Jonker, L. Cavalcante Siebert