Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-m789k Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-09T22:44:22.077Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

20 - Piagetian Roboethics via Category Theory

Moving beyond Mere Formal Operations to Engineer Robots Whose Decisions Are Guaranteed to be Ethically Correct

from PART IV - APPROACHES TO MACHINE ETHICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2011

By
Selmer Bringsjord ,
Joshua Taylor ,
Bram van Heuveln ,
Konstantine Arkoudas ,
Micah Clark  and
Ralph Wojtowicz
Edited by
Michael Anderson  and
Susan Leigh Anderson
Michael Anderson
Affiliation:
University of Hartford, Connecticut
Susan Leigh Anderson
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
Get access

Summary

Introduction

This paper introduces an approach to, rather than the final results of, sustained research and development in the area of roboethics described herein. Encapsulated, the approach is to engineer ethically correct robots by giving them the capacity to reason over, rather than merely in, logical systems (where logical systems are used to formalize such things as ethical codes of conduct for warfighting robots). This is to be accomplished by taking seriously Piaget's position that sophisticated human thinking exceeds even abstract processes carried out in a logical system, and by exploiting category theory to render in rigorous form, suitable for mechanization, structure-preserving mappings that Bringsjord, an avowed Piagetian, sees to be central in rigorous and rational human ethical decision making.

We assume our readers to be at least somewhat familiar with elementary classical logic, but we review basic category theory and categorical treatment of deductive systems. Introductory coverage of the former subject can be found in Barwise and Etchemendy [1] and Ebbinghaus, Flum, and Thomas [2]; deeper coverage of the latter, offered from a suitably computational perspective, is provided in Barr and Wells [3]. Additional references are of course provided in the course of this paper.

Preliminaries

A category consists of a collection of objects and a collection of arrows, or morphisms. Associated with each arrow f are a domain (or source), denoted dom f, and a codomain (or target), denoted cod f.

Type
Chapter
Information
Machine Ethics , pp. 361 - 374
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barwise, J. and Etchemendy, J., Language, Proof, and Logic. New York, NY: Seven Bridges, 1999.Google Scholar
Ebbinghaus, H. D., Flum, J., and Thomas, W., Mathematical Logic (second edition). New York, NY: Springer-Verlag, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barr, M. and Wells, C., Category Theory for Computing Science. Montréal, Canada: Les Publications CRM, 1999.Google Scholar
Inhelder, B. and Piaget, J., The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1958.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wason, P., “Reasoning,” in New Horizons in Psychology. Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966.Google Scholar
Wason, P. and Johnson-Laird, P., Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972.Google Scholar
Bringsjord, S., Bringsjord, E., and Noel, R., “In defense of logical minds,” in Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998, pp. 173–178.Google Scholar
Rinella, K., Bringsjord, S., and Yang, Y., “Efficacious logic instruction: People are not irremediably poor deductive reasoners,” in Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Moore, J. D. and Stenning, K., Eds. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001, pp. 851–856.Google Scholar
Piaget, J., “Intellectual evolution from adolescence to adulthood,” Human Development, vol. 15, pp. 1–12, 1972.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Popper, K., The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London, UK: Hutchinson, 1959.Google Scholar
Bringsjord, S., Arkoudas, K., and Bello, P., “Toward a general logicist methodology for engineering ethically correct robots,”IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 38–44, 2006. [Online]. Available: http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/bringsjord_inference_ robot_ethics_preprint.pdf.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arkin, R. C., “Governing lethal behavior: Embedding ethics in a hybrid deliberative/reactive robot architecture – Part iii: Representational and architectural considerations,” in Proceedings of Technology in Wartime Conference, Palo Alto, CA, January 2008, this and many other papers on the topic are available at the url here given. [Online]. Available: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/ai/robot-lab/publications.html.Google Scholar
Goble, L., Ed., The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2001.CrossRef
Arkoudas, K. and Bringsjord, S., “Metareasoning for multi-agent epistemic logics,” in Fifth International Conference on Computational Logic In Multi-Agent Systems (CLIMA 2004), ser. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI). New York: Springer-Verlag, 2005, vol. 3487, pp. 111–125. [Online]. Available: http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/arkoudas.bringsjord.clima.crc.pdf.Google Scholar
Piaget, J., Introduction a l' Épistémologie Génétique. La Pensée Mathématique. Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973.Google Scholar
Marquis, J. P., “Category theory and the foundations of mathematics,”Synthese, vol. 103, pp. 421–447, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lawvere, F. W., “An elementary theory of the category of sets,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA, vol. 52, pp. 1506–1511, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bringsjord, S., “Declarative/logic-based cognitive modeling,” in The Handbook of Computational Psychology, Sun, R., Ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 127–169. [Online]. Available: http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/sb_lccm_ab-toc_031607.pdf.Google Scholar
Bringsjord, S., “The logicist manifesto: At long last let logic-based AI become a field unto itself,”Journal of Applied Logic, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 502–525, 2008. [Online]. Available: http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/SB_LAI_Manifesto_091808.pdf.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barwise, J., “Axioms for abstract model theory,”Annals of Mathematical Logic, vol. 7, pp. 221–265, 1974.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambek, J., “Deductive systems and categories I. Syntactic calculus and residuated categories,”Mathematical Systems Theory, vol. 2, pp. 287–318, 1968.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arkoudas, K., “Simplifying Proofs in Fitch-Style Natural Deduction Systems,”Journal of Automated Reasoning, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 239–294, Apr. 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Touretzky, D., Halelamien, N., Tira-Thompson, E., Wales, J., and Usui, K., “Dualcoding representations for robot vision in Tekkotsu,”Autonomous Robots, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 425–435, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Touretzky, D. S. and Tira-Thompson, E. J., “Tekkotsu: A framework for AIBO cognitive robotics,” in Proceedings of the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 2005.
Arkoudas, K. and Bringsjord, S., “Propositional attitudes and causation,”International Journal of Software and Informatics, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 47–65, 2009. [Online]. Available: http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/PRICAI_w_sequentcalc_ 041709.pdf.Google Scholar
Russell, S. and Norvig, P., Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×