Extending Socio-Technological Reality for Ethics in Artificial Intelligent Systems

Due to significant technological advances leading to an expansion of the possible solution space of more or less autonomously operating artificial intelligent systems in real-world environments, society faces the challenge to specify the goals of these systems while jointly covering ethical conceptions and legal frameworks. In this paper, we postulate that for this complex task of societal relevance pertaining to both AI Ethics and AI Safety, Virtual Reality (VR) and also Augmented Reality (AR) represent valuable tools whose utilization facilitates the extension of socio-technological reality by offering a rich counterfactual experiential testbed for enhanced ethical decision-making. For this purpose, we use the example of autonomous vehicles (AVs) to elaborate on how VR and AR could provide a twofold structured augmentation for the governance of artificial intelligent systems by enhancing society with regard to ethical self-assessment and ethical debiasing. Thereby, we extend existing literature by tailored recommendations based on insights from cognitive neuroscience and psychology to solve inconclusive open issues related to past VR experiments involving ethically relevant dilemmas in AV contexts. Finally, we comment on possible VR/AR-based cognitive-affective augmentation measures for a transformative impact on future AI Ethics and AI Safety endeavors.