AI Can Stop Mass Shootings, and More

TL;DR

This paper explores how ethically reasoning AI, built on logicist foundations, can potentially prevent mass shootings by making real-time decisions to protect lives, demonstrated through two simulation scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a logic-based AI framework for ethical decision-making aimed at preventing mass shootings, with concrete simulation examples illustrating its application.

Findings

AI can effectively prevent mass shootings in simulated scenarios.

Ethical reasoning AI can make real-time decisions to protect lives.

Rebuttals address potential objections to ethical AI in violence prevention.

Abstract

We propose to build directly upon our longstanding, prior r&d in AI/machine ethics in order to attempt to make real the blue-sky idea of AI that can thwart mass shootings, by bringing to bear its ethical reasoning. The r&d in question is overtly and avowedly logicist in form, and since we are hardly the only ones who have established a firm foundation in the attempt to imbue AI's with their own ethical sensibility, the pursuit of our proposal by those in different methodological camps should, we believe, be considered as well. We seek herein to make our vision at least somewhat concrete by anchoring our exposition to two simulations, one in which the AI saves the lives of innocents by locking out a malevolent human's gun, and a second in which this malevolent agent is allowed by the AI to be neutralized by law enforcement. Along the way, some objections are anticipated, and rebutted.