Presentations
Dean’s Lecture, Jesuit School of Theology, Santa Clara University, Berkeley, CA
As artificial intelligence and robots become more sophisticated, autonomous, and pervasive, those systems make decisions and behave in ways that increasingly impact human well-being. These emerging autonomous technologies require moral attention to system behavior and functioning (machine ethics) and a way for the systems (and their developers) to account for human moral and spiritual values in order to enable the systems' beneficial operation. Although humans become aware of morality and spirituality through culture, computers are not social animals and are better suited to create meaningful models from texts influencing or describing human morality and spirituality. As an initial investigation, I present a model of the language and topics for Thomas Aquinas's moral theology in Summa Theologica. By expanding the sources, methods, and applications of that approach, further work aims to develop more complete models of human morality for scholarly investigation and machine ethics.
