[lrh9]

Wow! 

I never expected this to receive so many replies.

I haven't read any of Moral Machines in a while. I still intend to, but I've been waylaid by the more exciting stuff. (Coding.)

Morality is controversial in terms of what it is and what is moral and immoral.

I don't have an answer that everyone would readily agree to.

But sometimes I think the important question is not "What is moral?" (the vast majority of adults seem to have their minds made up), but "What am I (or we) going to do about it?"

People and societies have answered that question in different ways.

Democracies and republics trend towards permitting personal choice, with the exception being a sufficiently large public interest can refuse permission to behaviors that directly (or to a lesser extent indirectly) affect people without their consent. (E.g. they ban pollution because it harms them.)

Dictatorships or oligarchies enforce what they consider to be moral or immoral regardless of the will of their citizens.

Utopian societies tend to practice an isolationist policy. That means they avoid contact with those they consider immoral and refuse membership to those people.

So I'd say that in any group dynamic the individual or group with the power to impose its choice of moral (or immoral, depending on perspective) system decides what to do and the consequences for not doing it.

As for who that will be when AI is created, and what their system will be? One guess is as good as another.

lordjakian, thank you for pointing out my oversight. "Unmanning the frontlines" does not mean "unmanning the military".

But I don't know that the rules would be made obsolete. Assumptions about the intrinsic imperatives of machines would prove among the most dangerous if false.

Few answers and more questions.