Blueprints for Machine Ethics: A Digital Terrarium for Socio-Ethical Artificial Agent Decisionmaking

In a world increasingly driven by artificially intelligent autonomous agents, it is imperative that these agents behave according to well-understood ethical standards. We provide a unified computational framework for simulating societies of autonomous agents and for evaluating the impact of individual agent decisions on overall societal success. To the best of our knowledge, this digital terrarium is the first such system that allows for a direct comparison of various socio-ethical agent behaviors. As a first step, we present implementations of three popular ethical theories: Jeremy Bentham’s hedonic act utilitarianism, ethical altruism, and ethical egoism. We compare these algorithmic decision models in a head-to-head manner and demonstrate that cooperative, utilitarian societies lead to vastly superior societal outcomes compared to the other two. Our explicit goal is to demonstrate the overt benefit of transparent, algorithmic ethical decisionmaking, in which developers, vendors, and users operate with awareness of the forms of ethical reasoning utilized by their technologies. Our results are a validation of a rich, interdisciplinary tapestry of work concerning the benefits of cooperation versus greediness. We enhance our results by also considering the impact of individual agent greed on a society’s overall success (or failure). Though exploring greed (and similar phenomena) is interesting in itself, our more important contribution is our malleable, robust, and foundational experimental framework that facilitates comparative insights across a wide variety of popular socio-ethical models. We invite scholars from all disciplines to use our digital terrarium to grapple with challenging questions using this new simulation-focused methodology, in hopes that it may meaningfully shed some light on these questions. Our experiments in this article are not exhaustive. Rather, they are illustrative of the role that simulation can play in answering or understanding big questions in our society in response to rapid technological change.