Modelling Morality

With a requirements specification from the previous chapter, and test scenarios, this chapter begins to develop a more technical model for morality, first by examining the relationships that are typically demonstrated in human moral developing agents—children. The child-caregiver relationship is examined to develop a model of morality based upon feedback a child might receive from their caregiver to develop their own moral perspective of the world. There is then an attempt to translate this model into a technical approach, akin to ‘raising robots to be good’, through a secondary, ‘meta’, feedback module that guides Reinforcement Learning systems. The chapter ends with an assessment of this model, using the test specification and cognitive requirements developed in the previous chapter.