Ethical Dilemmas for Engineers in the Development of Autonomous Systems

Abstract

The development of ethical autonomous systems requires that engineers determine the publicly acceptable actions and decisions of these systems. And yet, recent cases show that engineers working for large organizations do not always act for the public good or the benefit of society. Ethics are often presented as objective social and legal norms, rather than a complicated series of constraints and expectations, determined from multiple sources. Engineers are forced to navigate the expectations of the numerous groups of which they are members, including the organizations and industries that they work for, the engineering profession, regulators, and society in general. These expectations can come into conflict. Engineers are then expected to determine whose values and standards take precedence. Unfortunately, as the results of this study show, engineers rarely explicitly consider the ethical or social implications of the technologies that they are developing.