To quote T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” [1]: “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.”

Raising robots to be good: a practical foray into the art and science of machine ethics is a timely and critical rethink of life and work in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) [2,3].

The book consists of nine chapters: (1) “Introduction”; (2) “Background”; (3) “A Survey of Machine Ethics”; (4) “Why We need Moral Machines”; (5) “A Framework and Approach”; (6) “A Recipe for Morality”; (7) “Modelling Morality”; (8) “The Ethics of Machine Ethics”; and (9) “Summary and Next Steps.” It concludes with a glossary and index.

This book is both scholarly and practical. Scholars will appreciate the concise research summaries and extensive references. Of particular significance for entrepreneurs, engineers, and regulators is a redefinition of machine ethics as enabling moral agency as opposed to constraining moral behavior. Table 6.1 is a definition of the requirements and test specification for moral agency in a machine. According to Raper, these requirements are:

(1) Must be able to make [autonomous] decisions;

(2) Must understand its own within the given situation;

(3) Must be motivated to act in the situation at hand;

(4) Must be able to envisage consequent states of affairs given a particular action;

(5) Must understand its self in relation to the given state of affairs;

(6) Must have its own personality;

(7) Must be free;

(8) Must need positive social interaction; and

(9) Must prioritize positive social interaction above everything else.

Additionally, Raper outlines what she calls “robot psychology,” that is, how machines function from a psychological perspective for humans to understand. She proposes four questions to be researched:

(1) What are the machine’s motivations?

(2) Does the machine have inherent desires, and if so, what are they?

(3) How does the machine process information from its environment to make decisions?

(4) What are the machine’s cognitive abilities?

Chapter 9 reviews the past, present, and future of machine ethics, and provides a roadmap of where we need to go: “understand how children/humans develop morally,” and four steps for a program on mortality studies:

(1) Better understand the human moral cognitive faculty;

(2) A more sophisticated information transfer model for moral knowledge acquisition;

(3) Explore what assurance means in the context of AI safety; and

(4) Investigate and develop a new regulatory framework [for] the introduction of moral machines.

Some of this work is underway [4,5].

The book concludes with a compelling closing remark: “Solving the problem of morality is not about finding a solution to what good behavior constitutes, but it is about a never-ending exploration into how we ought to live.”

However, are humans prepared for such an exploration? Watch the movie I’m not a robot [6]. Play the game Moral Machine, “a platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence” [7]. You be the judge.