Ethics-based Negotiation in the Decision-Making of Autonomous Systems

The presence of autonomous decision-making systems is rapidly increasing, impacting many aspects of our daily lives. Designed to learn and act independently, these systems can make decisions on behalf of their users without human intervention. However, a major challenge for their successful deployment is integrating human-like ethical values into their decision-making process, ensuring alignment with users' moral perspectives. When considering ethics in the decision-making process, a key challenge is how autonomous systems should interact with each other to reach an agreement, given that users' ethical preferences may vary. This talk presents an approach for architecting autonomous systems that leverages the ethical profiles of end users to regulate autonomous behavior and support decision-making through ethics-based negotiation. The goal is to reach situational agreements that satisfy the ethical beliefs of all parties involved.