Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
the robot itself or its designers, engineers, programmers, manufacturers,
wholesalers, retailers (and perhaps their employees), repair personnel, in-
stallers,...and/or even their owners. Philosophers Luciano Floridi and
Jeff Sanders discuss the traditional view of responsibility, namely that
only software engineers (human programmers) can be held morally ac-
countable, a view influenced by the commonly held opinion that only
humans can exercise free will.
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“Sometimes that view is perfectly appro-
priate. Our more radical and extensive view is supported by the range of
difficulties which in practice confronts the traditional view.” [24]
The difficulties that Floridi and Sanders list are the following:
1. Software is largely constructed by teams, raising the question: which
members of the team are responsible for any of the software's
failings?
2. Management decisions during software development may be at
least as important as programming decisions, raising the question:
should it be the managers or the programmers or both who should
take any blame?
3. If management requirements and specification documents play a
large part in the resulting software, where lies the division of
responsibility between management and those who write the
specifications?
4. Although the accuracy of software is dependent to some extent on
those responsible for testing it, much software relies on “off the
shelf ” components whose provenance may be uncertain and whose
functioning may be unreliable.
5. Working software is the result of maintenance over its lifetime and
so the responsibility is not just that of its originators but also of
its maintainers, programmers and those who manage them. For
these reasons it may be appropriate to hold a corporation or other
organisation accountable when its employees are partly or wholly
responsible when software goes wrong.
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Free will is the freedom to decide what to do and how to act, irrespective of outside influences. I
question the opinion that only humans can exercise free will on the basis of my first-hand experience,
namely that my cats, and presumably other animals, appear to express free will.
