Giving robots a conscience

Is it really a conscience if it's just programming a robot to avoid injuring another human, or to go into a building to save someone's life? It wouldn't be a question of morality, or altruism, or any of the other mysterious processes operating in our brains. We've developed a conscience over however many gazillions of generations of evolution, presumably because it's been - for the most part - evolutionarily advantageous. (Recent political events may disprove that.) In some way, it has to have helped us survive. Programming a robot to race into a burning building isn't the same thing as programming in a conscience; it's programming in self-sacrifice. Morality and empathy, presumably, wouldn't factor into it at all.

If, however, they want to try to program empathy into their robots, I suggest they check out Ex Machina first. Bad idea. Real bad idea.

“Listen,” said Ford, who was still engrossed in the sales brochure, “they make a big thing of the ship's cybernetics. A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers, with the new GPP feature.”
“GPP feature?” said Arthur. “What's that?”

“Oh, it says Genuine People Personalities.”

“Oh,” said Arthur, “sounds ghastly.”

A voice behind them said, “It is.” The voice was low and hopeless and accompanied by a slight clanking sound. They span round and saw an abject steel man standing hunched in the doorway...

“Ghastly,” continued Marvin, “it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it. Look at this door,” he said, stepping through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator as he mimicked the style of the sales brochure. “All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.”

As the door closed behind them it became apparent that it did indeed have a satisfied sigh-like quality to it. “Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm ah!” it said...

"Thank you the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation," said Marvin, and trudged desolately up the gleaming curved corridor that stretched out before them. "Let's build robots with Genuine People Personalities," they said. So they tried it out with me. I'm a personality prototype. You can tell, can't you?"

the capacity to make moral or ethical judgments. AI is nowhere near the level where the appropriate reaction to these sorts of stories is anything other than laughter.

An appropriate analogy is to think about us, in 2015, talking about morality and ethics of the machine (as opposed to the engineer making the machine) the same way as the Montgolfier Brothers thinking about flying to the Moon in the 1700s with their hot air balloon. Sure, it's the first step in that direction, but a whole lot of stuff that we don't even know what it looks like needs to happen between here and there.