purplecat | Prospective Responsibility for Multi-Agent Systems

One of the projects for which I have a reasonable time allocation is about modelling responsibility. We're focusing on what we're calling prospective responsibility which is how responsibilities shape choices of goal and action (in contrast to retrospective responsibility which is about allocating praise and/or blame). This short paper sets our initial representation of a framework for how someone (e.g., a programmer or user) could describe responsibilities to a computational system which could then use that description to choose goals/actions. It's a short paper which meant we had to cut out the examples in order to get it to length and the result is therefore rather dry and a lot of the motivation has been lost.

To be honest, this is still very much a work in progress. The framework feels a bit too complex to me (and has become more complex since we wrote this paper as we try to incorporate ideas of moral and legal responsiblities) and I'm not sure we're really certain yet that responsibilities are a good way to frame these kinds of high-level motivational constraints.