Researchers from Edinburgh University will soon begin a project to scrutinise how autonomous machines can be made responsible and trustworthy.

The research will develop recommendations for making autonomous technologies more answerable to people in areas such as healthcare, public services, and finance.

Part of the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) programme, the project will examine the scope of autonomous technologies – including automated software algorithms, robots, and aircraft autopilots.

The 30-month project, titled Making Systems Answer: Dialogical Design as a Bridge for Responsibility Gaps in Trustworthy Autonomous Systems, is backed by a grant award of over £559,000 and will begin in January 2022.

Autonomous machines are used in a variety of different areas of our lives, many of which we likely don’t consider – from helicopters to Roomba vacuum cleaners.

The UKRI programme has invested £33 million to address some of the questions around autonomous systems, including whether they are safe, reliable, ethical, and trustworthy.

Edinburgh Uni’s team will also explore how to “establish responsibility for actions and decisions” that autonomous technologies take, by ensuring their answerability to people.

Going forward, the team said they hope the research will aid the design of technologies that operate ethically and legally while benefiting society.

Additionally, the project will explore the issue of responsibility gaps – a problem that arises when a machine or software agent is unable to bear responsibility for its actions and their outcomes.

Guidance will be developed from the results of the project, including recommendations for bridging these gaps by making autonomous systems more answerable to people in workplace, healthcare, and financial settings.

The research team is being led by Professor Shannon Vallor, who holds the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences and is Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

Other partners include the Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate, the NHS Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab) and software analytics specialists SAS.

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Commenting on the research, Professor Vallor said: “Holding one another responsible for our actions is a pillar of social trust. A vital challenge in today’s world is ensuring that autonomous systems strengthen rather than weaken that trust.

“We are thrilled to launch this innovative multidisciplinary collaboration, which interweaves philosophical, legal and computational approaches to responsibility to enable the design of autonomous systems that can be made more answerable to the people who rely on them.”

The Trustworthy Autonomous System is funded through the UKRI Strategic Priorities Fund and delivered by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

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