XR for Augmented Utilitarianism

Abstract

Steady progresses in the AI field create enriching possibilities for society while simultaneously posing new complex challenges of ethical, legal and safety-relevant nature. In order to achieve an efficient human-centered governance of artificial intelligent systems, it has been proposed to harness augmented utilitarianism (AU), a novel non-normative ethical framework grounded in science which can be assisted e.g. by Extended Reality (XR) technologies. While AU provides a scaffold to encode human ethical and legal conceptions in a machine-readable form, the filling in of these conceptions requires a transdisciplinary amalgamation of scientific insights and preconditions from manifold research areas. In this short paper, we present a compact review on how XR technologies could leverage the underlying transdisciplinary AI governance approach utilizing the AU framework. Towards that end, we outline pertinent needs for XR in two hereto related contexts: as experiential testbed for AU-relevant moral psychology studies and as proactive AI Safety measure and enhancing policy-by-simulation method preceding the deployment of AU-based ethical goal functions.