In search of an ethics for intelligent machines: Ethical, legal, and societal aspects of AI and advanced robotics

As our lives increasingly depend on intelligent machines, so too do the Ethical, Legal, and Societal (ELS) problems that every technology has always posed throughout human history. ELS - aspects of robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are now being studied by various disciplines and different research projects. They are also perceived by the citizenry: along with curiosity and the desire to try out new applications of technologies, there exists in laypeople - often not explicitly expressed, sometimes organically stated - a sense of uneasiness - towards innovations that can be grouped under the question: Where is all this taking us? In 2002, Roboethics, the applied ethics relating to the ethical, legal and societal problems of advanced robotics, was proposed by a community of roboticists and scholars from the Humanities. Over more than 20 years of studies, projects, and debates on the need for ethics for robotics, we have very often found ourselves unable to come up with adequate solutions. At the same time, some national and supranational governmental public institutions have made public guidelines for the use of robots with learning capabilities. With the development of AI, the problems have increased and become more complex.