Mind the Gap: Autonomous Systems, the Responsibility Gap, and Moral Entanglement

Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’22) (2022)
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Abstract

When a computer system causes harm, who is responsible? This question has renewed significance given the proliferation of autonomous systems enabled by modern artificial intelligence techniques. At the root of this problem is a philosophical difficulty known in the literature as the responsibility gap. That is to say, because of the causal distance between the designers of autonomous systems and the eventual outcomes of those systems, the dilution of agency within the large and complex teams that design autonomous systems, and the impossibility of fully predicting how autonomous systems will behave once deployed, determining who is morally responsible for harms caused by autonomous systems is unclear at a conceptual level. I review past work on this topic, criticizing prior works for suggesting workarounds rather than philosophical answers to the conceptual problem presented by the responsibility gap. The view I develop, drawing on my earlier work on vicarious moral responsibility, explains why computing professionals are ethically required to take responsibility for the systems they design, despite not being blameworthy for the harms these systems may cause.

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Author's Profile

Trystan S. Goetze
Cornell University

References found in this work

Freedom and Resentment.Peter Strawson - 1962 - Proceedings of the British Academy 48:187-211.
Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility.John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza - 1998 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Mark Ravizza.
What We Owe to Each Other.Thomas Scanlon - 2002 - Mind 111 (442):323-354.
Freedom of the will and the concept of a person.Harry Frankfurt - 2004 - In Tim Crane & Katalin Farkas, Metaphysics: a guide and anthology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Two faces of responsibility.Gary Watson - 1996 - Philosophical Topics 24 (2):227–48.

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