How Could We Know When a Robot was a Moral Patient?

There is growing interest in machine ethics in the question of whether and under what circumstances an artificial intelligence would deserve moral consideration. This paper explores a particular type of moral status that the author terms psychological moral patiency, focusing on the epistemological question of what sort of evidence might lead us to reasonably conclude that a given artificial system qualified as having this status. The paper surveys five possible criteria that might be applied: intuitive judgments, assessments of intelligence, the presence of desires and autonomous behavior, evidence of sentience, and behavioral equivalence.

The limits of machine intelligence: Despite progress in machine intelligence, artificial general intelligence is still a major challenge.

Despite recent breakthroughs in machine learning, current artificial systems lack key features of biological intelligence. Whether the current limitations can be overcome is an open question, but critical to answer, given the implications for society.