Related papers: Space ethics to test directed panspermia

There is a scientific and ethical imperative to embrace a multidimensional, continuous view of ancestry and move away from continental ancestry categories

The Defense Department and NASA are investigating the possibility that aliens are currently surveilling Earth. This aligns with some search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence (SETI) theorists who have concluded that ET's best strategy for…

There is much debate in machine ethics about the most appropriate way to introduce ethical reasoning capabilities into intelligent autonomous machines. Recent incidents involving autonomous vehicles in which humans have been killed or…

Ethicists, policy-makers, and the general public have questioned whether artificial entities such as robots warrant rights or other forms of moral consideration. There is little synthesis of the research on this topic so far. We identify…

A simple stochastic model for evolution, based upon the need to pass a sequence of n critical steps (Carter 1983, Watson 2008) is applied to both terrestrial and extraterrestrial origins of life. In the former case, the time at which humans…

For more than 100 years, humanity (both specialists and enthusiastic laics) has been searching for extraterrestrial life hoping we are not alone. The first step in the quest for extraterrestrial life is to define what and where exactly to…

In the last few years, AI continues demonstrating its positive impact on society while sometimes with ethically questionable consequences. Building and maintaining public trust in AI has been identified as the key to successful and…

We study the process of panspermia in Milky Way-like galaxies by modeling the probability of successful travel of organic compounds between stars harboring potentially habitable planets. To this end, we apply the modified habitability…

Many projects relies on cognitives sciences, neurosciences, computer sciences and robotics. They concerned today the building of autonomous artificial beings able to think. This paper shows a model to compare the human thinking with an…

Almost all SETI searches to date have explicitly targeted stars in the hope of detecting artificial radio or optical transmissions. It is argued that extra-terrestrials (ET) might regard sending physical probes to our own Solar System as a…

Eudaemonics is the study of the nature, causes, and conditions of human well-being. According to the ethical theory of eudaemonia, reaping satisfaction and fulfillment from life is not only a desirable end, but a moral responsibility.…

While various traditions under the 'virtue ethics' umbrella have been studied extensively and advocated by ethicists, it has not been clear that there exists a version of virtue ethics rigorous enough to be a target for machine ethics…

Ethics is an ancient matter for human kind, from the origin of civilizations ethics have been related with the most relevant human concerns and determined cultures. Ethics was initially related to religion, politics and philosophy to then…

Human influence on the biosphere has been evident at least since the development of widespread agriculture, and some stratigraphers have suggested that the activities of modern civilization indicate a geological epoch transition. The study…

Suppose some future technology enables the same consciously experienced human life to be repeated, identically or nearly so, N times, in series or in parallel. Is this roughly N times as valuable as enabling the same life once, because each…

For most of human history, we have not thought systematically about how and why we incorporate aspects of the natural world into our designs. The lack of a systematic approach has resulted in inconsistencies in motivations and methods that…

Transparency is a key requirement for ethical machines. Verified ethical behavior is not enough to establish justified trust in autonomous intelligent agents: it needs to be supported by the ability to explain decisions. Logic Programming…

This paper introduces the Shepherd Test, a new conceptual test for assessing the moral and relational dimensions of superintelligent artificial agents. The test is inspired by human interactions with animals, where ethical considerations…

There is a wide-ranging debate about the merits and demerits of searching for, and sending messages to, extraterrestrial intelligences (SETI and METI). There is however reasonable (but not universal) consensus that replying to a message…

We shall have a hard look at ethics and try to extract insights in the form of abstract properties that might become tools. We want to connect ethics to games, talk about the performance of ethics, introduce curiosity into the interplay…