Robots between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Abstract

This article presents classic dilemmas and transfers them to the information age with special focus on the problem-ridden use of chatbots, robots, drones and self-driving cars. Solution concepts are developed from the perspective of machine ethics among others. It turns out that classic dilemmas are useful for mastering today’s challenges and helpful for discussing the decision-making options of partly or fully autonomous systems and for sensitizing robotics, artificial intelligence and information science to such matters in order to optimize their results and products.