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Alexei Grinbaum

Alexei Grinbaum is a philosopher and physicist. Researcher at CEA-Saclay, he is a specialist in quantum information. Since 2003, he has been interested in ethical issues related to new technologies, including nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence and robotics. A member of the Research Commission on the Ethics of Research in Digital Science and Technology (CERNA), he recently published “Robots and Evil” (Desclée de Brouwer, 2019).

Robots and Evil

Domestic robots are informers, conversational agents insult their interlocutors. Worse still, computer systems participate in human conflicts and sometimes even provoke them. On March 18, 2018, an autonomous Uber company killed a woman who was crossing the street in an Arizona city. This was the first pedestrian death caused by an algorithm. Who is responsible? The answer to this question is one of the most urgent challenges in our relationship to digital technologies. But it’s not about knowing how to make artificial intelligence benevolent. It is a question of making sure that it does not replace the man as a moral agent. Only recourse to chance, and this from its conception, can release the machine of the responsibility that one wants to make him carry.