The Rise of the Machines

Richard Dooling in the NY Times writes about how machines may become so essential to complex decision making that we no longer have the capacity to turn them off.  He discusses how the Unabomber foresaw our creeping dependence on machines, and how their role in the financial market may provide the path to servitude. Nowhere does he discuss whether machines themselves might be programmed to include ethical evaluations of their own decisions in their computations.