Moral machines: From value alignment to embodied virtue

Implementing sensitivity to norms, laws, and human values in computational systems has transitioned from philosophical reflection to an actual engineering challenge. The “value alignment” approach to dealing with superintelligent AIs tends to employ computationally friendly concepts such as utility functions, system goals, agent preferences, and value optimizers, which, this chapter argues, do not have intrinsic ethical significance. This chapter considers what may be lost in the excision of intrinsically ethical concepts from the project of engineering moral machines. It argues that human-level AI and superintelligent systems can be assured to be safe and beneficial only if they embody something like virtue or moral character and that virtue embodiment is a more appropriate long-term goal for AI safety research than value alignment.