Michael and Susan Anderson have published an article on Machine Ethics (ME) in the October issue of Scientific American. In the article, Robot Be Good: A Call for Ethical Autonomous Machines, they introduce both ME and their recent work programming ethical principles in Nao, a humanoid robot which was developed by the French company Aldebaran Robotics.

Their findings in brief:

• Robots that make autonomous decisions, such as those being designed to assist the elderly, may face ethical dilemmas even in seemingly everyday situations.
• One way to ensure ethical behavior in robots that interact with humans is to program general ethical principles into them and let them use those principles to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.
• Artificial-intelligence techniques can produce the principles themselves by abstracting them from specific cases of ethically acceptable behavior using logic.
• The authors have followed this approach and for the first time programmed a robot to act based on an ethical principle.