Responsibility in the age of autonomous machines

Abstract

'Responsibility' is a concept of central importance in ethics. In ethics, responsibility has traditionally been applied only to a human or a group of humans. However, the recent development of ICT has revealed a limitation of this old conception of responsibility. In this paper, we will see what conditions are traditionally required for responsibility attribution, and how these conditions are faced with difficulties by technologies today, especially those which produce autonomous agents like AIs or robots. Then we will consider how the concept of responsibility has to change in a society where autonomous machines and humans coexist.