Incompleteness of moral choice and evolution towards fully autonomous AI

Nowadays, it is fashionable to add the attribute "with artificial intelligence" to all possible devices, platforms and machines. The problem of ethical decision-making, viewed from the perspective of computer, technical and natural sciences, lies only in the complexity of the topic. AI scientists and developers basically proceed from the Turing machine model, assuming that a machine can be constructed to resolve any problems (including ethical decision-making issues) that can mechanically calculate a particular function if this function can be put into an algorithm. Thus, ethical decision-making is conceived as an abstract concept whose manifestation does not depend on the particular physical organism in which the algorithm takes place, nor on what it is made of. Whether from photons, mechanical relays, quantum fluctuations, artificial neurons or human nerve cells. If in practice, a sufficiently complex algorithm is built, it will also exhibit sufficiently complex behavior that can be characterized as ethical in the full sense of the word. This article reflects the main argument that if a task requires some form of moral authority when it is performed by humans, its full automation, transferring the same task to autonomous machines, platforms, and AI algorithms, necessarily implies the transfer of moral competence. The question of what this competence should include presupposes empirical research and reassessing purely normative approaches in AI ethics.

Tomas Hauer