IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2014 - 22

COMMENTARY

DEBORAH
G. JOHNSON

MEREL
NOORMAN

Recommendations for Future
Development of Artificial Agents

A

set of technologies, loosely referred to as
"artificial agents," is becoming more pervasive and more powerful in the current computing landscape. All artificial agents are
built on a computational foundation. Some are purely
computational, e.g., Internet bots, search engines, and
others are physically embodied entities with computational decision-making components, e.g., robots,
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and autonomous
cars. The noteworthy feature of artificial agents - the
feature that leads to the artificial agent label - is their
capacity to operate autonomously. At some level or to
some degree, artificial agents operate independently
from the humans who design and deploy them. They
are agents in the sense that we deploy them to perform tasks on our behalf and often these tasks involve
learning and decision-making. Since humans previously performed many of these tasks, we mark the
difference, that is, the machine performance of these
tasks, by referring to them as "artificial."
Responsibility issues are prominent in the discourse on artificial agents. Much attention has been
given to the possibility that artificial agents might
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2014.2363978
Date of publication: 1 December 2014

22

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develop in ways that will make it impossible to hold
humans responsible for their behavior. We believe
that this concern misconstrues the situation and
distracts attention from more important and more
urgent issues. Rather than lamenting the possibility of artificial agents for which no one can be
responsible, attention should be focused on how to
develop artificial agents so as to ensure that humans
can be responsible for their behavior. This involves
attending to the optimal distribution of tasks among
human and non-human (machine) components of
artificial agent systems; appropriate designations
of responsibilities to the humans operating in the
system; and development and implementation of
responsibility practices to support the assignments
of tasks and responsibilities.
As part of a National Science Foundation funded
project ("Ethics for Developing Technologies: An
Analysis of Artificial Agent Technology"), we developed a set of recommendations for the future development of artificial agents. An early version of the
recommendations was presented to a small group
of experts in the fields of robotics, computer science, philosophy, ethics, law, and policy. Based on
the feedback received from these experts, the recommendations were revised. We present the final
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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WINTER 2014



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