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Posted on 2021/11/23 by mendicott

**Virtual Human Ethics**

*The ethics of artificial intelligence is an existing field of study, which consists of the areas of robot ethics and machine ethics. Robot ethics deals with ethical problems that occur with robots, such as whether robots pose a threat to humans, or whether uses of robots are problematic, as in healthcare or in war (Lin et al., 2014). Machine ethics is concerned with artificially intelligent machines as actual or potential moral agents (Anderson & Anderson, 2011). As virtual robots, virtual humans inherit many of the ethical issues surrounding hardware robots, such as potential bias (Henderson et al., 2019). Machine ethics, the creation of moral agents, is outside the scope of this inquiry, which is concerned primarily with the role of dialogue systems in virtual humans.*

*In their 2019 book, Virtual Humans, Burden and Savin-Baden dedicate a chapter to issues surrounding ethics, and another to identity (Burden & Savin-Baden, 2019). They address immortality in an additional chapter, and consider what impact this may have on humanness. Burden and Savin-Baden discuss the ethical, moral and social ramifications of the disclosure of information to virtual humans. They also mention the social concerns that people may have, particularly in the context of robot ethics in general. Burden and Savin-Baden address the capability of robots for moral judgement, in the absence of emotions and empathy, as well as the widespread efforts of governments around the world to grapple with these issues, including the formulation of regulatory frameworks. (Since this is not an ethics dissertation, the reader is directed to Burden and Savin-Baden for in-depth discussion.)*

*For moral compass, one need look no further than the physicianâ??s Hippocratic Oath, respect for the individual human to the extent possible, and minimization of harm of all kinds. Using virtual humans for social simulation, for instance in education and training, could have far reaching social benefits for society, for instance in education, not to mention economic benefits. At the same time, widespread social simulation may also have downsides, for instance in the workplace, such as the unknown potential for job replacement. Bill Gates has suggested taxing the robots, or the people profiting most from robots (Oberson, 2019).*

*In June 2019, Tiffany Hsu wrote about the new, post-Uncanny Valley social media phenomenon known as â??virtual influencersâ? (Hsu, 2019). Virtual influencers are photorealistic virtual humans with elaborate backstories, to the extent that their followers often donâ??t realise they are not human. It can be said that these are â??white hatâ? uses of virtual humans, not unlike the â??white lieâ? of Santa Claus; however, there are also â??black hatâ? uses for this deception. In any case, I believe the social media success of virtual influencers is becoming a de facto â??Uncanny Valleyâ? test, or yardstick for believability. This so far socially acceptable charade is counterbalanced by examples of socially unacceptable charades such as deepfakes, and fake news spread by evil Twitter bots (Rini, 2019). In response to these and similar issues, the California State Legislature became the first to pass a bot disclosure law in July 2019 (Cohen, 2019).*
* Anderson, M., & Anderson, S. (2011). Machine ethics.
* Burden, D., & Savin-Baden, M. (2019). Virtual Humans.
* Cohen, N. (2019, July 2). Will Californiaâ??s New Bot Law Strengthen Democracy? The New Yorker.
* Henderson, P., Sinha, K., Angelard-Gontier, N., Ke, N. R., Fried, G., Lowe, R., & Pineau, J. (2019). Ethical Challenges in Data-Driven Dialogue Systems.
* Hsu, T. (2019, June 17). These Influencers Arenâ??t Flesh and Blood, Yet Millions Follow Them. The New York Times.
* Lin, P., Abney, K., & Bekey, G. (2014). Robot ethics: The ethical and social implications of robotics.
* Oberson, X. (2019). Taxing Robots. Edward Elgar Publishing.
* Rini, R. (2019, June 10). Deepfakes Are Coming. We Can No Longer Believe What We See. The New York Times.

 

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