IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 75

A Lesson From AI: Ethics
Is Not an Imitation Game
Gonzalo Génova and
Valentín Moreno Pelayo
Computer Science and Engineering Department,
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid,
28911 Madrid, Spain
 The TiTle of The 2014 movie The Imitation
Game tells us the life of Alan Turing, especially his
outstanding participation in the decipherment of
the German messages encrypted with the Enigma
machine in the Bletchley Park Complex [1], [2]. The
expression " the imitation game " is from Turing himself:
these are the first words of his 1950 article, Computing
Machinery and Intelligence [3]. It is also the
name of a game played by the Victorian aristocracy,
which consisted in a blind exchange of handwritten
messages to try to guess whether the interlocutor was
a woman or a man.
When Turing proposes his famous experiment-
the Turing test-to determine if a machine can think,
his focus is on a notion of intelligence as the capacity
to solve " closed " (that is, computable) problems,
whose paradigm would be the chess game or the
deciphering of keys. It is not that he did not care
about the ethical questions; of course he cared, but
possibly they did not enter within what he considered
" intelligence. "
Those were the beginnings of artificial intelligence
(AI). But the questions AI raises today about
ethics, in general, and equity, in particular, are
increasingly important (we mean " equity " in the
sense of attending to each one's circumstances and
needs, which usually does not imply the mathematical
" equality " of certain measurable personal
features). We see a particular threat in some misconceptions
about ethics among the developers of
machine ethics. In this article, we reflect on some
M. Rosario González Martín
Department of Educational Studies,
Universidad Complutense de Madrid,
28040 Madrid, Spain
of these questions and also on what we can learn
when we consider how to teach ethical behavior
and equity to a machine.
Programed ethics
The ethical behavior of machines has supplied
the theme for a vast amount of more or less fanciful
speculation, especially in science fictions. A paradigmatic
example is Isaac Asimov and his legendary
Three Laws of Robotics (see Figure 1), first formulated
in a story written in 1941 (Runaround), at the
same time that Turing was working hard and doing
something fairly significant in Bletchley Park. The
short story would later become part of the collection
I, Robot (which, by the way, has very little to do with
the 2004 movie with the same title).
Leaving apart the conceptual and technical difficulties
that a hypothetical implementation of the
Three Laws in a real machine would present, the
interest of the Asimovian robotic universe is, in our
opinion, twofold. It lies in the introduction of futuristic
technological elements, but above all in the
dynamics that results from the interplay of these three
laws: the conflicts they provoke, and the ingenious-
and sometimes heroic-solutions that the humans
involved in the stories find. In a way, they are as much
science-fiction stories as they are ethics, political, or
sociology-fiction stories.
The Three Laws of Robotics are an attempt to
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2022.3147531
Date of current version: 9 March 2022.
March 2022
explicitly program an ethical code into a robot, that
is, a sort of explicit or programed ethics. Classical
programming is an explicit procedural description
of the instructions that a computational machine
(a computer) has to follow to carry out a task. The
task can be to add two numbers, to take a package
0278-0097/22©2022 IEEE
75
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022

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