When HAL Kills, Stop Asking Who’s to Blame Autonomous machines and responsibility By Minao Kukita ‘Responsibility’ is a concept of central importance in ethics. In ethics, responsibility has traditionally been applied only to a human or a group of humans. However, the recent development of ICT has revealed a limitation of this old conception of responsibility. In this paper, we will see what conditions are traditionally required for responsibility attribution, and how these conditions are faced with difficulties by technological developments today, especially those that produce autonomous agents like AIs or robots. Then we will consider how the concept of responsibility has to change in a society where autonomous machines and humans coexist. Keywords: autonomous machines, responsibility Categories: Automation. Corresponding Author: Minao Kukita Email: minao.kukita@is.nagoya-u.ac.jp Introduction Daniel C. Dennett once asked the question ‘When HAL kills, who’s to blame?’ and suggested that it is possible to blame an artificial intelligent system with higher-order intentionality (which HAL 9000 in the film 2001 A Space Odyssey seems to have), i.e., ability to reflect on, think about, or have desires concerning its own mental states such as beliefs, desires, and so on. 1 For example, if a machine intended to be a being which would desire to be kind to others, the machine could be thought of as having a kind of higher-order intentionality. While Dennett attempted to explore the theoretical possibility that an artificial intelligent system can qualify as a responsible agent, today this question has gained practical importance. This is not because artificial autonomous systems have acquired a certain level of higher-order intentionality to the extent that we may regard them as praiseworthy or blameworthy, which they do not seem to have done yet, but because they are likely to kill. Car manufacturers and ICT companies across the world are now competing to develop self-driving systems, with Ford recently announcing that their fully autonomous cars with no steering wheels or gas pedals would be in mass production within five years. 2 While 1 When HAL Kills, Who’s to Blame? Computer Ethics. Daniel C. Dennett. HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality. D. G. Stork (ed.). MIT Press, 351-365, 1997. 2 CNBC - http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/09/ford-aims-for-self-driving-car-with-no-gas-pedal-no-steering- wheel-in-5-years-ceo-says.html - Accessed 01/02/2017.