Cross-Cultural Application of Ethical Principles in the Design Process of Autonomous Machines

Engineering is defined as an activity that aims at producing useful things that generate human benefit. However, currently a large part of the robotics industry is driven by the development of “killer applications” capable of causing tremendous amount of human suffering and harm. We propose a twofold solution to the ethical dilemma: external ethical guidelines combined with intrinsic engineering practices. As a first step to help mitigate the anticipated problems, governments and international organisation should promote a generally accepted codification of roboethics. This codification should comprise a basic set of
hard boundaries that must not be crossed under any circumstances. The first step can be seen as an external ethics approach. As a second step, we propose that the residual ethical risk should be taken into consideration by implementing an oath for technology developers (New Archimedes' Oath), analogous to the Hippocratic oath…