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By: Zach Short

Nigel Crook is a well known name amongst the programming industry. He got his start at Lancaster University. “He studied Computing and Philosophy, a course that unbeknown to him, would prepare him well for his future career”[1]. With a start in computing and philosophy, Crook eventually went on to get a PhD in expert systems. He originally wanted to go into ministry, so he went back to school for a degree in Biblical Studies. He has been a co-author on many papers about AI and the ethics behind it.

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One paper that he is the co-author on is that of “What if: Robots create novel goals? Ethics based on social value systems”. [2] This paper discusses a wide variety of topics that all relate back to how robots cannot have ethics programed into their knowledge database. Most of the paper is spent describing why there is no plausible way for robots to have an ethical code. One very important quote from this is, “predefined ethical systems may reflect more on the ethical preferences of the designers rather than those of the people who end up being subject to the robot’s actions”. This being said, we cannot count on an ethically correct robot any time soon due to the complexity of human ethics. In another paper, “From social interactions to ethical AI: a developmental road map” [3], Crook talks about how robots have had a bad light shown on them because of their inability to handle ethical decisions that all humans cannot even agree upon.  Crook states that “machine ethics suffers from the fact that there is no (and never was a) universal agreement on a code of ethics.” This is a major issue to those trying to create robots that can be fully functional in everyday circumstances. There is no way to program a robot to know what is ethically correct if there is still debate amongst humans as to what actually is ethically correct.