MINT Honours Students Win ASD Scholarships

Australian Signals Directorate Scholarships for MINT Honours Students

Antonio Esposito and Ben Robinson have won scholarships from the ASD to be apart of the ASD-ANU Co-Lab, for their honours year. 

Antonio's project explores whether the norms that apply to autonomous systems are the same as would apply to human actors in similar choice situations; if they are not, then the 'bottom-up' approach to machine ethics would need serious revision, since we could not necessarily infer from human judgments about what they would do in a particular choice situation, anything about what autonomous systems should do faced with an otherwise similar choice. 

Ben's project is part of the moral skill grant. It will focus on three case studies: lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS); care robots; and recommender algorithms aimed at amplifying newsworthy content online. LAWS and care robots afford quite obvious examples of the risk of moral deskilling—the stakes could hardly be higher in both cases. But recommender algorithms may present the most socially impactful example of the risk of AI-induced moral deskilling, as our increasing reliance upon them diminishes our own ability to determine, independently, what content is worth our attention and what is not. Prioritising how to allocate our attention may be one of the most fundamental moral skills—especially according to the 'ethics of care'—and our growing dependence on recommender algorithms to filter the functionally infinite amount of content available online might pose an existential threat to that skill. 

Thanks to the Australian Signals Directorate for their support of these young researchers!