Professor Nigel Crook is head of Robotics and Machine Learning at Oxford Brookes University. In this talk he will explore whether we can build robots that have good moral character – and whether or not we should. He will broadly outline some existing approaches to building ‘autonomous moral machines’ and offer his own thoughts on what should be the key components to such machines.

The idea of robots being able to make decisions based on a form of moral code has been around longer than robots themselves. Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which include an over-riding command to avoid harming humans, first appeared in his 1942 short-story Runaround. But reality is finally catching up with science-fiction and the creation of robots with moral competency is now a tantalising possibility.

Nigel will discuss how it may become a necessity as robots become increasingly autonomous, intelligent and complex.