Ethics by Design concerns the methods, algorithms and tools
needed to endow autonomous agents with the capability to
reason about the ethical aspects of their decisions, and the
methods, tools and formalisms to guarantee that an agent’s
behavior remains within given moral bounds. In this context
some questions arise: How and to what extent can agents understand
the social reality in which they operate, and the other
intelligences (AI, animals and humans) with which they coexist?
What are the ethical concerns in the emerging new
forms of society, and how do we ensure the human dimension
is upheld in interactions and decisions by autonomous
agents?. But overall, the central question is: “Can we, and
should we, build ethically-aware agents?”
This paper presents initial conclusions from the thematic
day of the same name held at PRIMA2017, on October
2017: https://prima2017.gforge.uni.lu/
ethics.html.