Ethical Dilemmas for Engineers in the Development of Autonomous Systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of ethical autonomous systems requires that engineers determine the publicly acceptable actions and decisions of these systems. And yet, recent cases show that engineers working for large organizations do not always act for the public good or the benefit of society. Ethics are often presented as objective social and legal norms, rather than a complicated series of constraints and expectations, determined from multiple sources. Engineers are forced to navigate the expectations of the numerous groups of which they are members, including the organizations and industries that they work for, the engineering profession, regulators, and society in general. These expectations can come into conflict. Engineers are then expected to determine whose values and standards take precedence. Unfortunately, as the results of this study show, engineers rarely explicitly consider the ethical or social implications of the technologies that they are developing.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.052 | 0.064 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".