Abstract:

Our social and individual life in the 21st century is comprehensively shaped by accelerated technology and scientific development, in the world of work as well as in health, safety, mobility, communication and much more. As a result, previous social traditions, social practices and moral norms of living together are undergoing a process of fundamental change.

We have concluded that it is necessary for prospective Computer Scientists to reflect on these questions and to develop an awareness of the scope of their own agency. To this end, it is very helpful for students to engage with debates, texts and questions on the topic of "machine ethics" from social sciences and humanities disciplines.

Here, we present the agenda, the essential contents and first lessons learned from an elective course in the bachelor curriculum of the Computer Science programme at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW Hamburg), which we held twice in the last semesters. In particular, we motivate addressing this interdisciplinary topic in a Computer Science degree programme. We outline the challenges of enabling interdisciplinary reasoning. Our practices, based on backgrounds in both social sciences and computer science research are outlined to motivate comparable efforts.
The interdisciplinary nature of the course topic is reflected by an iterative, alternating succession of lectures and group discussions. In addition, so-called inverted classroom sessions are integrated as well. The later activities are geared towards activating students and transition from the acquisition of knowledge to critical text work.

Throughout the course, we address the question of what it means when machines are increasingly thought of and constructed in a more autonomous and intelligent way, so that their activities become increasingly ethically relevant. What is a moral machine, how large is its potential scope for action and how is it constructed? To this end, we look at texts from the latest research and application field of machine ethics, which is located at the interface of computer science, philosophy and robotics. The course particularly relates ethical reasoning with the development of cyber-physical systems. This active research field explores the development of coherent systems of physical and logical components. These systems typically requires autonomous adaptive system components, ethical challenges arise. We also look at the first applications in which machine ethics is already being used.

Keywords:

Machine ethics, computer science, social sciences, autonomous agents, adaptive systems.