Noel Sharkey interviews Colin Allen

Noel Sharkey interviewed Colin Allen for his Sound of Science podcast on 13th March
.

Here's Noel's description of the interview:

Would you trust a machine to make life and death decisions about you. It doesn’t have to be a robot. It might be a piece of software that decides when to turn off your life support. A new book worth a read this year is Moral Machines: Teaching robots rights and wrongs (sic) by Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen. Noel talks to one of the authors, Colin Allen a Professor of Cognitive Science and the History and Philosophy of Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, to find out what all the fuss is about. The book discusses many of the issues about why and how machines in the near future will make ethical decisions about our lives. They are not talking about some far fetched super intelligent machine that is conscious. They are talking about machines based on today's technology. The book is written in a very straightforward, interesting and non-technical style. Although there are parts where I don’t agree with them, it is in everyone's interest to read this. It will make you better informed about a possible future that you may want to have opinions about - it is in your own interest.