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Introduction

Imagine a sufficiently simple world in which each being reacts to stimulii and performs actions by (a) observing certain values around itself and (b) updating its internal state according to some deterministic rule. Perhaps the internal states of other beings are discernible and so they too provide values to be employed in that process.

In principle, we could predict each agent's behaviour, if we knew each rule, by simulating the process described above. All past behaviour would be encapsulated in an agent's internal state. All future behaviour would be determined from an agent's current state by the parameters to which it becomes subjected. Thus all consequences of an action could in principle be determined. Since internal state is revealed, there would be little use in that world for terms we use in our world to approximate the result of our own mental state (like mood, obligation, regret, intent and so on). Indeed the study of Ethics in such a world would be radically different from that in ours.

Is it conceivable that our world is like that? Many of the corresponding values involved are subjective. They result from agents whose internal states are far from clear even to themselves, let alone to others. And so it might be felt that such a world, no matter how interesting its lessons might be for our own Ethics, could only be the object of a remote Gedanken experiment (c.f. [15]).

In this paper we begin an investigation of the degree to which Cyberspace -- that world of information acted upon by artificial agents -- can be regarded as such a world. There are convincing reasons why it may be. Each agent can be thought of as a finite automaton that acts in just the way described above: its state is determined by the values of all its internal variables; it reacts with its environment by consuming input and generating output; and its program code determines the rule by which it updates its state in light of its input and by which it acts. On the other hand, there are bound to be limitations on the degree to which that view tells the whole story about Cyberspace. If a formula does exist to answer yes/no questions about the ethical nature of an action in Cyberspace, it could not be computable, for the uncomputable Halting Problem can be encoded as such a question. One could not expect to answer low-level engineering or physics questions about the media in which the agents are implemented, because the nondeterminism involved in quantum phenomena would defeat any deterministic formula. And care would have to be exercised to circumscribe the boundary of Cyberspace, otherwise subjective values of its human users would easily supervene (e.g. 'I prefer one program to another because its interface suits me better').

With these provisos in mind, our interest in such an investigation arises from the pressing need for a methodology to discuss problems in Computer Ethics (the supply of such examples is enormous, see [1,13]). In this paper, we concentrate on problems restricted to Cyberspace, overlooking human intervention. In that domain, we develop the suggestion [5] that entropy provides a foundation for Information Ethics -- the methodological foundation of Computer Ethics. The larger context of our work is the widespread interest in artificial equivalents, in Cyberspace, of standard concepts like knowledge (Pollock), being (Steinhart), life (Bedau, Boden), experience (Lycan), moral value (Danielson), creativity (Boden) and of course intelligence and learning (see [2,11] for a current summary of those endeavours). We shall find ourselves promoting a new interpretation of a form of evil distinct from moral or natural evil. We label it 'artificial'. Artificial evil appears suitable for modelling immoral or criminal actions in Cyberspace. Our task here is to consider the foundation of an Information Ethics that may deal with artificial evil; the subject is studied in its own right in [7].

We begin by recalling, in section 2, why Information Ethics is not a standard Ethics. In section 3 we determine the properties an Information Ethics should have; and in section 4 we introduce methods for defining entropy structures in Cyberspace. An action is regarded as a state transformer and thereby judged evil if it increases state in the entropy ordering. Although our methodology is formal (the action is described mathematically and its propensity for evil decided by a mathematical definition) ordinary judgement underlies the choice of ordering. Naturally, the assumptions that make that approach viable in Cyberspace do not immediately hold in the 'real world'. Examples from both Cyberspace and the real world are considered in section 5. In section 6 we reflect on why our proposal is consistent with the properties we formulated earlier.

We begin by discussing the untenability of standard Ethics in any formulation of Information Ethics.


next up previous
Next: Information Ethics is a Up: Entropy as Evil in Previous: Entropy as Evil in

L. L. Floridi and J. W. Sanders
1999-12-09