Intentionen bag 'Ethical Trap' af Aviva Rutkin

The article “Ethical Trap” from 2014 by Aviva Rutkin is about a test where a robot was supposed to protect others from falling into a hole. However, they had difficulty deciding who to save when faced with multiple choices, highlighting the challenges of teaching robots to make ethical decisions. The intention of the article is to make people calmer about robots. Ruskin tries to highlight that even though robots are going to be a part of our daily basis, we shouldn’t be afraid of robots taking full control. It says in the text: “But in 14 out of 33 trials, the robot wasted so much time fretting over its decision that both humans fell into the hole” (page. 35, l. 31-32). By this quote, Rutkin tries to show the readers that robots can't even make decisions by themselves and are therefore not fully functioning. So how should they be able to take full control of the world? Rutkin is also able to ease people's concerns by stating Winfield’s description which is that the robot is an “ethical zombie” (page. 35, l. 35). As you can see, Rutkin wants to ease readers' fears about robots' role in our daily lives by reassuring them that they aren't quite capable of taking over.